M-Pesa Integration in Kenya

With NaiForge it is KES 20,000 one-time on a Starter or Standard shop, and included at no extra cost in Premium. The Kenyan market rate for a standalone Daraja API integration runs roughly KES 20,000-50,000, and full custom commerce integrations with reconciliation dashboards are quoted at KES 75,000-150,000. Safaricom does not charge for API access itself — you pay per-transaction fees only.

No, and most shops under about 10 orders a day should not buy it yet. Every NaiForge shop takes M-Pesa on day one via Pay-to-Till: the customer pays your Till number, you confirm the order in chat. No gateway, no gateway fee, and the money reaches your Till instantly. This add-on automates the confirmation step — it is a volume upgrade, not the difference between accepting M-Pesa and not.

Pay-to-Till (the default, no add-on) costs you Safaricom's own Buy Goods rate, roughly 0.55%, and nothing else. With this add-on the gateway takes a gateway rate that varies by provider — published Kenyan M-Pesa rates run 1.5-3.5%. That is the real trade-off: you are paying a percentage of every sale to stop reading confirmation codes by hand. Below roughly 10-15 orders a day the manual route is usually still the better economics.

Slower, honestly. Pay-to-Till is real-time — the money is in your Till the moment the customer pays. With the gateway add-on, Paystack settles T+2 to your nominated account. The add-on buys you automation and verified orders, not faster money. If cash-flow timing matters more to you than manual reconciliation, stay on Pay-to-Till.

A registered Till Number or Paybill, which requires a registered Kenyan business (sole proprietorship, limited company or partnership) and a KRA PIN. Personal M-Pesa numbers cannot be used for online checkout. Registration takes 1-3 working days and Safaricom charges roughly KES 1,000-3,000 depending on tier. Then the gateway runs its own KYC on top — budget 1-5 working days.

STK push is the M-Pesa pop-up: the customer types their phone number at checkout, a prompt appears on their handset, they enter their M-Pesa PIN, done. Safaricom's official name for it is Lipa Na M-Pesa Online, and it is one endpoint of the Daraja API — Safaricom's developer platform. Most Kenyan merchants asking for 'Daraja integration' mean exactly this.

The order stays unpaid and the customer is told immediately, in plain language, with the option to retry. This matters more than it sounds: naive integrations either strand the order in a pending state forever or mark it paid on the browser callback, which is trivially faked. We confirm against the gateway's server-to-server webhook, so a payment is paid only when the gateway says it is.

Not as a bolt-on — we integrate on shops we built, because payment code we cannot vouch for end to end is code we cannot support. If you are on WooCommerce, a plugin licence is typically KES 5,000-15,000 and worth trying first. On Shopify you will need a third-party gateway plus Shopify's own surcharge on top — 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. If neither works out, talk to us about rebuilding — that is a package price, not an add-on.