WooCommerce has named Paystack its preferred payments partner for WooCommerce in Africa. More than 20,000 merchants are using the free Paystack WooCommerce Payment Gateway plugin but searching for and downloading the plugin separately is no longer required. Store owners can now easily select Paystack as a payment method when inside the WooCommerce dashboard.

Paystack has a recently updated tutorial for how to set up the gateway in WooCommerce. As an alternative to the recommended method, merchants can opt to install the free plugin instead.

Paystack is the most widely used payment gateway in Africa, accounting for more than half of all online transactions in Nigeria. More than 60,000 stores use the gateway. In October 2020, it was acquired by Stripe for more than $200M. The gateway can be used by businesses in Nigeria and Ghana and last month it added support for South Africa, after a six-month long pilot program.

“Paystack is leading the charge in bringing a world-class payments experience to African merchants,” WooCommerce Director of Business Development Mechiel Couvaras said. “Their product offering, user experience, and expansion plans within Africa were some of the most important factors in considering the partnership. Receiving funding from  Stripe and Visa was also a strong indicator of their potential.”

Paystack, like all of WooCommerce’s other payment partners, has a financial arrangement with the e-commerce platform where it pays a percentage of transactions processed. Couvaras said the Paystack partnership is directly with Paystack and separate from WooCommerce’s Stripe partnership.

“eCommerce is still very nascent in most African countries, however, Nigeria and South Africa are amongst our fastest growing countries globally,” Couvaras said. When Stripe acquired Paystack, the company noted that African online commerce is growing 21% year-over-year, 75% faster than the global average. WooCommerce is well-positioned to capture some of that growth with Paystack pre-installed as a preferred payment partner.

The e-commerce platform is also keeping tabs on other emerging markets, as global market adoption has grown to 8.2% of the Alexa top 10 million websites. Over the past year WooCommerce launched partnerships with Indian payment companies Razorpay and PayU India, as well as Mercado Pago, a Latin American payments company focused on supporting local payment methods across Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay.