How to sell online in Ghana

You've got customers. What you haven't got is a way for them to see the price without asking, pay without a back-and-forth, and receive the thing without you personally arranging a rider each time.

That's four pieces, and a website isn't one of them.

A page with prices and sizes. A MoMo number or account people can send to. A delivery plan that doesn't depend on you being free that afternoon. And a rule about confirming money before stock leaves the house. Mobile money does the heavy lifting, and it got cheaper in 2025: Parliament repealed the Electronic Transfer Levy and the Ghana Revenue Authority ordered charging entities to stop deducting it from 2 April 2025, which means the 1% that used to come off transfers is gone. Your buyers noticed. It's a small thing that made a real difference to how willingly people send small amounts.

What still costs you is confirming that the money landed, and we'll spend proper time on that, because it's where sellers lose stock.

The rails your buyers already have

Mobile money. MTN MoMo, Telecel Cash, AirtelTigo Money. This is how most people in Ghana move money to a small business, and it's interoperable across networks now, so a Telecel customer can pay an MTN number.

MoMoPay merchant shortcode. If you register as a merchant you get a shortcode, and here's the part that matters commercially: when a buyer enters that shortcode, the registered business name comes up on their phone before they approve. That is a trust signal a plain personal number cannot match. Buyers are told, correctly, that if no name appears they should stop. Register as a merchant if you can. It converts.

Bank transfer. Through GhIPSS instant pay, or a plain transfer for larger amounts and for business buyers who want a bank record.

GhQR. One QR standard your buyer can scan with a bank app or a MoMo wallet.

Cash on delivery. Very common in Accra and Kumasi, usually with a dispatch rider, and increasingly settled at the door by MoMo rather than notes.

Now the part you need before you plan anything.

Sailo's complete list of payment rails is card, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, email, phone, bank transfer and cash on delivery. There is no mobile money rail. No MoMo, no Telecel Cash, no MoMoPay integration. It does not exist and it is not hiding in a setting.

What sellers do instead is run MoMo as a manual rail. Put your MoMo number or your merchant shortcode into the bank transfer instructions field, which is free text, write your business name next to it so the buyer knows what they should see, tell them exactly what reference to use, and then confirm the payment yourself against your own MoMo SMS. That works. Thousands of small businesses across West Africa run exactly like that. Understand what it is, though. Sailo is holding your catalogue and your order record. Your phone is holding the money, and you are the confirmation step.

The card button, and why it probably won't appear

Sailo's card rail runs on Stripe and nothing else.

On Stripe's own global availability page, read in August 2026, Ghana appears under the extended network served by Paystack rather than as a launched Stripe country. Sailo does not support Paystack, whatever you may have read on the marketing site. Which means no Sailo plan, paid or free, will reliably give a Ghanaian seller a working card checkout.

That's a sentence that costs Sailo money to write, and it's true, so here it is plainly. If you genuinely need card acceptance, set it up directly with a Ghanaian provider and run it alongside. Sailo can hold your products, options, prices and order flow while the money arrives by MoMo or by a card link you generate elsewhere. Just don't build your plan around a button that isn't going to switch on.

For most sellers reading this, the honest answer is that you don't need cards yet anyway. Do you need card payments to sell online works through the arithmetic, and under about forty orders a month the subscription costs more than the convenience is worth.

Confirming money, and the alert that isn't one

Mobile money is instant. That's the good half, and it removes an excuse: if the buyer sent it, it's there.

The failure that costs Ghanaian sellers stock is the fake alert. A message that looks like the MoMo confirmation SMS, with plausible formatting and a balance that adds up, arriving at exactly the moment a rider is standing in your doorway. You're busy, it looks right, the parcel goes.

The rule that ends it costs eleven seconds:

Never release stock on a message. Release it on a balance. Dial the code, look at the actual balance, find the actual credit. An SMS is a text message, and text messages can say whatever the sender wants.

Second rule: a screenshot is not proof. A screenshot proves a screen existed.

Third: give every order a reference and ask the buyer to use it. Your MoMo history shows you a number and an amount, and if you had four GH₵95 orders that week you're guessing which is which. The full method, including partial payments and the buyer who paid into the wrong number, is in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived. It applies to MoMo just as much as to a bank.

Getting the parcel there

Ghana has three delivery systems for a small seller and they fail in different ways.

Dispatch riders, inside a city. Fast, personal, negotiated per trip or per day, and entirely dependent on one person's phone being on. If the rider collects money for you, settle daily, in front of him, both of you looking at the same figure. Not that evening from memory. That's how a week of small discrepancies turns into an argument neither of you can reconstruct.

Ride-hailing delivery. Bolt and Yango for intra-Accra parcels when you need something moved now and don't have a regular rider. More expensive per trip, no relationship, but instant.

The intercity bus. This is the one that never appears in e-commerce advice and does an enormous amount of real work. You hand the parcel to the driver's mate at the station, the buyer's cousin collects it at the other end, and it gets to Kumasi or Takoradi the same day for a fraction of a courier's price.

Here's the practitioner detail on that last one. Send the bus number, the departure time and the driver's phone number to the buyer as soon as the parcel is on board, and tell them to be at the station. There is no tracking link and there is never going to be one. The buyer knowing exactly which vehicle to meet is the entire tracking system, and sellers who treat it casually spend the evening on the phone.

For the wider question of moving things locally without paying courier rates, delivering locally without a courier covers the options and what each one costs you in time.

Worked example: Efua, shea body cream, Accra

Efua makes shea-based body cream in Accra. GH₵95 for a 250ml tub, GH₵160 for two, roughly 90 tubs a month, mostly Instagram and TikTok with a growing number of repeat buyers who message her directly.

Her setup:

• One bio link to a page with both sizes, the ingredients, and a line at the top: "Accra delivery GH₵25 to GH₵40 depending on area. Kumasi and Takoradi by bus, GH₵30, same day if ordered before 11am."
• Payment: MoMo through her registered merchant shortcode, with her business name written on the page so buyers know what should appear before they approve. Bank details underneath for the two salons that buy in bulk and want an invoice.
• Reference: order number, every time, written into the instructions.
• Confirmation: she checks her merchant balance, not the SMS, and she marks the order paid before she tells a rider anything.

A normal month is around GH₵8,500 of goods. Her cost of taking payment through Sailo is zero, because on MoMo and bank transfer Sailo never touches the money and takes nothing. Her mobile money provider's own charges are between her and them, and she checks them, because provider fee schedules change and the number she memorised in January was not the number in July.

The mistake she made in month four: she started saying yes to "pay on delivery" for anyone who asked, without a rule. Within six weeks she'd had five riders come back with unsold tubs because the buyer wasn't picking up, and one she paid twice. She now offers pay on delivery only to buyers who've ordered before, and takes GH₵30 upfront from everyone else. The GH₵30 isn't a deposit. It's a filter, and refusals went to almost nothing.

Pricing when the cedi moves

If any part of your cost came through Tema port, your price has a shelf life. Packaging, oils, pumps, bottles, printed labels, anything imported.

Two habits protect you, and they're both boring.

Price against your replacement cost, not what you paid. If a carton of tubs cost you GH₵420 in March and costs GH₵540 today, your GH₵95 tub is priced off a number that no longer exists. You'll feel fine right up until the moment you reorder and find your margin went somewhere.

And put a date on your price list. "Prices as of August 2026" written on the page gives you permission to change a price without an argument. Buyers accept a dated price changing. They don't accept feeling tricked.

For anything with a lead time longer than a week, quote with an expiry. "This price holds until Friday" is a normal, professional sentence and it stops you honouring a quote you gave before your input costs moved. Selling in a currency that moves goes further into repricing cadence, quoting windows and holding stock instead of cash.

Looking like a shop that will still be there next month

Ghanaian buyers check, and the signals that work are unglamorous.

• A merchant name that matches the shop they think they're paying. Covered above, and it's the single biggest one.
• Photos of the actual product in your own hand, in your own light. Supplier catalogue images get reverse-searched, and buyers do it more than sellers think.
• Delivery areas and days written as a list, not negotiated per order.
• Prices on the page. A shop that answers "how much" with "DM for price" reads as a shop pricing by how rich you look.
• Screenshots of previous buyers confirming their parcel arrived. Slightly ugly on a page, and they convert.

Speed of first reply matters more than most sellers believe. A buyer who asks at 8pm and hears back at noon the next day has usually bought from someone else. If you can't answer fast, at least make sure the page already answers what they were about to ask.

Registering the business

Two separate obligations that people mash together.

There's registering a business name or a company, which is what gets you a corporate bank account, a name nobody else can register, and suppliers who'll take you seriously. And there's tax, which applies to income whether or not you've registered anything.

I'm not printing current fees or thresholds. They change, and a stale figure in an article can cost you real money. Check the Registrar General's Department for what registration currently costs and the Ghana Revenue Authority for what you currently owe, or buy an accountant's hour before you assume you're under a line.

What you can do today, with no registration at all: keep every order in one place with a date, an amount and a buyer, and stop paying for ingredients out of the same MoMo wallet you use for trotro fare. Whatever you register as later, that separation is the thing you'll wish you'd started sooner.

The honest limits

No mobile money rail. This is the big one in Ghana. MoMo in the instructions field is a workaround, it's a good workaround, and it is not an integration. If you want a platform that settles MoMo into your account for you, this is not it.

No card button, most likely. Stripe's availability page in August 2026 put Ghana in the Paystack extended network, and Sailo's card rail is Stripe-only. Not something a plan upgrade solves.

Sailo can't tell you money arrived. Your order sits at pending until you mark it paid, and you mark it paid by looking at your own balance. That's the permanent trade for a manual rail, which carries no commission at all.

The free plan is $0 and caps at 10 products. For Efua's two sizes that's nowhere near a constraint. For someone listing thirty shades of foundation it is.

What to do next

Tonight, register a MoMo merchant shortcode if you don't have one, and check what business name comes up when someone enters it. If it says something other than the name your buyers know you by, fix that before you do anything else. A name mismatch stops more payments halfway than any other single thing.

Then write your delivery areas and charges as a list of real numbers, put them where a buyer can read them without messaging you, and add one line to your own head that you don't break: nothing leaves the house until the balance has changed.

Then look at your last ten unanswered questions in the DMs and put every answer on the page. If you're weighing up every payment rail before committing to one, how to take payment as a small seller compares what each costs you and what it leaves on your desk afterwards.