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Collect payments with PesaPal

PESAPAL uses a hosted checkout: Centipid Billing submits an order, sends the payer’s browser to PesaPal’s payment page, and reads the transaction status back from PesaPal before crediting anything. PesaPal is the most widely offered gateway in the catalog — Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DR Congo, Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe.

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Before you start

  1. Complete PesaPal merchant onboarding in an account owned by the ISP.
  2. Collect the consumer key and consumer secret from the PesaPal dashboard.
  3. Confirm your workspace has a public HTTPS domain. PesaPal validates the IPN URL when it is registered, and rejects one it cannot accept.
  4. Plan the walled garden: the payer’s browser must reach PesaPal’s page, so a Hotspot subscriber who is not yet online cannot pay unless PesaPal is reachable pre-authentication.

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Configure the gateway

1

Open Settings → Payments → PesaPal

Select PesaPal from the payment marketplace.
2

Enter the consumer key and consumer secret

Both are required. The secret is stored as a secret and is not echoed back into the form after saving.
3

Save — the IPN URL registers itself

Saving registers your IPN (Instant Payment Notification) URL with PesaPal and stores the id it issues. Every order carries that id, so this step is what makes checkout possible at all. If registration fails you are told so on this page, with PesaPal’s reason.
4

Run a controlled test payment

Pay a small amount from the captive portal on an unauthenticated device, and confirm the payment reaches the ledger.

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Credentials

Both gate the switch. The IPN id is not a field — it is registered for you and stored automatically.

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Callback URLs

Nothing to paste into the PesaPal dashboard by hand. The order carries its own return address, and the IPN URL — https://<your-host>/api/pesapal/webhook — is registered with PesaPal when you save your credentials.
The IPN is re-registered automatically if your workspace domain changes, so notifications follow the move. If a re-registration fails while a working id is already stored, payments keep running on the stored id rather than stopping.The notification is not what credits a payment: the transaction status is read back from PesaPal. But PesaPal will not accept an order without a registered IPN id at all, which is why registration gates checkout.

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What the payer must provide

A phone number, and an email address when one is available — both are sent as the billing address on the order. The payment method itself is chosen on PesaPal’s page: card, mobile money, or Airtel, depending on what PesaPal has enabled for your account.

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How a payment completes

1

Submit order

Centipid Billing authenticates, submits the order with the amount, the reference, the billing address, and the registered IPN id, and receives a redirect URL.
2

Payment

The payer completes the payment on PesaPal’s page.
3

Verification

The transaction status is read back from PesaPal by its order tracking id. Only a completed status records a payment and applies the package.

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Troubleshooting

For every gateway’s fields in one place, see the credential reference.