Consumers – E-Commerce & Marketplaces · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

The customer is ready to pay; the merchant simply cannot take the money the way the customer wants to give it. That mismatch is the new leak in African retail. Evidence of multi-platform payment behaviour across Africa is pushing merchants to accept more channels or watch baskets get abandoned at the last step, after every other cost of winning the customer has already been paid.

In Botswana, where mobile money, bank transfers and cards coexist without one clear winner, the pressure lands directly on small traders. A Gaborone shop that takes only cash, or only one wallet, is choosing which customers it cannot serve – usually without realising it is making a choice at all. The shopper does not adapt to the merchant. The shopper leaves.

Interoperability is now a sales question

Payment interoperability used to be a back-office concern for the Bank of Botswana and the banks. It is now a front-counter one. When shoppers spread their spending across several platforms, the merchant who bridges those platforms captures the spend that rivals leak. The technical question of which systems talk to which has become a commercial question of who gets paid and who watches the customer walk out.

The shopper does not see this as the merchant's problem to manage; they see a checkout that works or one that does not. A buyer in Francistown who reaches for their preferred wallet and finds it unsupported rarely hunts for an alternative. They abandon the purchase, and often the shop, and in a small market where reputation travels they may tell others that the shop is awkward to pay.

Every channel a merchant refuses is a customer a rival accepts.

The cost of standing still

Adding channels carries real cost – fees, reconciliation, training staff in Francistown or Maun to handle each method. But the alternative cost, the abandoned basket, is invisible and therefore easy to ignore. The discipline is to treat a refused payment method as a measurable loss, not a neutral default that costs nothing. The sale that never happens leaves no record, which is exactly why it is so easy to keep losing.

Falling integration costs are tilting the maths. As interoperability lowers the price of adding a channel, the case for accepting only one weakens further. The merchant who waited because acceptance was expensive is running on an assumption that is steadily becoming false – the question has shifted from whether they can afford to add a channel to whether they can afford not to.

The abandoned basket is a cost; it is just one nobody puts on the books.

A more level field for small sellers

There is a competitive dimension that favours the small operator. When acceptance is cheap and channels interoperate, the gap between a large retailer's checkout and a sole trader's narrows. Both can take what the customer wants to pay with, and a roadside business in Maun can match the payment range of a formal chain. Cheap interoperability is the small seller's quiet equaliser.

That levelling has a regional edge too. As SADC markets push toward smoother cross-border payments, a Botswana merchant already set up for multi-channel acceptance is better placed to sell to a customer in a neighbouring market without rebuilding their entire payment stack. The capability built to chase local sales becomes the door to regional ones.

Cheap, interoperable acceptance lets a small seller compete like a large one.

A path into the formal economy

For Botswana's push to formalise and digitise small business, the merchant incentive is helpful. Operators adopt more channels because customers demand it, and in doing so they generate the digital records that bring them into the formal economy and within reach of CEDA finance and bank credit. Formalisation arrives as a side effect of chasing sales, which is the easiest way for it to arrive at all.

That record-keeping has a second payoff. The same transaction data that satisfies a lender also helps the trader understand their own business – what sells, when, and how customers pay. Multi-channel acceptance, adopted to win the basket, ends up building the evidence base a growing firm needs to borrow, plan and grow.

Accepting more ways to pay is how a trader joins the formal market.

The so-what for Botswana is that payment choice has become a competitive variable, not a compliance afterthought. The merchants who read multi-platform behaviour early and accept what their customers already use will hold the basket. Those who wait for one standard to win will keep losing sales they never see – and forfeiting the records that could have financed their growth.

Sources: arXiv