EcoCash, PayNow, and the art of not losing a sale

The most expensive moment in a sale is the last one. A buyer who has chosen the event, picked a tier, and reached the payment step has done all the hard work — and a payment flow that asks for one thing too many at that exact moment will still lose them.

We carry several rails because Zimbabwe pays in several ways: EcoCash and PayNow for mobile money, card for the diaspora, bank transfer for the cautious. The mistake we used to make was treating them as a menu the buyer had to study. The fix was to make the right choice obvious and the wrong ones invisible.

Most of the win came from removing steps, not adding features. Defaulting to the buyer's last-used method, pre-filling the number we already hold, and collapsing the rail picker until it's actually needed turned a multi-screen detour back into a single confident tap.

Reconciliation is the unglamorous half. We never fulfil a ticket on a hopeful browser redirect — we confirm the payment with the provider's own enquiry endpoint first, because mobile-money callbacks get lost and a ticket issued against a payment that didn't land is a refund and a support ticket waiting to happen.

The number that matters isn't conversion in the abstract; it's how many people who reached the payment step actually finished. Move that, and you've found revenue that was always there — standing at the till with money in hand, waiting for you to get out of the way.