Card, transfer or pay on delivery: which should your store accept?

Every payment method is a trade-off between how many buyers say yes and how much risk you carry. Here is how the three big ones play out for Nigerian online stores, and a sensible way to combine them.

Card and online payment

The gold standard for you as the seller: money is confirmed before you package anything, settlement goes to your bank, and there is a clean record of every naira.

The friction is on the buyer's side. Some buyers do not shop with cards online, and any extra step at checkout loses a few people. The fix is an inline payment experience that keeps the buyer on your store rather than bouncing them to a strange page, so paying feels like part of your shop and not a detour.

Accept cards from day one if you can. Even if it is not the majority of your orders at first, it is the method that scales.

Bank transfer

Transfers are how much of Nigeria actually pays. The advantages are real: no card needed and buyers trust what they use daily.

The cost is confirmation friction. "I have sent it" is not the same as money in your account, and matching transfers to orders eats time. Two rules keep transfers sane:

• Never dispatch until the money reflects. A polite "we ship as soon as the transfer lands" is normal and buyers expect it.
• Give the transfer an identity. When the order has a number and the buyer's name is attached, matching payments takes seconds instead of scrolling your alerts.

Pay on delivery

The most requested and the most abused. It removes all buyer risk, which is exactly why it converts well with first-time customers who do not know you yet. It also hands all the risk to you: rejected parcels, unreachable phones, and return courier fees for goods nobody paid for.

Pay on delivery is not a yes-or-no question. It is a where-and-what question:

• Offer it where delivery is cheap for you: your own city, your own rider.
• Switch it off for far states where a rejected parcel costs you two courier fees.
• Consider it for lower-priced items where a rejection stings less, and require part-payment for expensive ones.

The practical mix

Most successful stores run all three, tuned: cards always on, transfers always on with a firm confirm-before-shipping rule, and pay-on-delivery only in the locations where they can afford the risk.

That per-location control matters. On BuyAvrika, pay-on-delivery is a switch per state, transfers show your account details automatically with the order number attached, and card payments run through a secure inline checkout that settles directly to your bank with zero commission taken by the platform. Set the mix once and every checkout enforces it for you.