Today at DevFest 2018, Paynow announced their developer hub which aims to make it easier for developers to create new platforms using the popular payment gateway. The developer hub has different development kits that solve the mystery that used to be developing using the Paynow API.
In the company’s own words,
“previously when you wanted to develop using Paynow API, we just sent you a PDF and let you figure it out on your own”.
Yes, the adventure of figuring it out on your own can be quite fulfilling in and of itself but that alone often caused some developers to shy away from even attempting. Well with the development kits you’ll be able to get up and running much quicker and will have more time to focus on the business side of things so you don’t spend a lot of time integrating with their payment gateway.
Currently, there are five software development kits target the following programming languages: PHP, Java, Node.js, DotNet, and Python. Each kit is accompanied by a demo with full working code that you can test on their website and if things still aren’t clear after using the demos, there is some detailed documentation to help you.
Apart from the kits and revamped documentation, the Paynow developer hub also has a forum where you can help others by answering questions that they may have from facing challenges while trying to integrate with the payment gateway.
In the spirit of sharing, the software development kits are also open source so you can take a closer look at how they work, tweak the code and possibly have your changes added to the production version of the kit you would have edited.
You can find the repositories for the different development kits on Github and Gitlab to get started contributing to them.
They are also working on friendlier pricing for developers as most payments that developers are dealing with are low-value transactions under $5 or even $1 and so far their fees structure wasn’t accommodating to those realities on the ground.
It’s interesting to see how much of an impact the Paynow developer hub and these fees changes will have in the growth of e-commerce in Zimbabwe as developers find more ways to integrate with the payment gateway much more easily.
One thing is true though, Paynow is indeed working on working better with developers and I hope that other local tech companies will follow suit and make it easier for developers to develop.
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