Moldova - Allow local third-party payment gateways integration

[AlexMinza]

Shopify Payments is not available in Moldova https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/supported-countries

In fact - today there is no Shopify online card payment available for businesses in Moldova to be able to sell and acquire payments in local currency, Moldovan Leu (MDL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_leu

A few years ago Shopify stopped allowing third party payment gateways integration and introduced their own solution Shopify Pay:

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/creating-payment-apps-but-extension-not-available/td-p/...

 

Today, to create a proper Shopify Payment Gateway app according to the documentation https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/payments/offsite/use-the-dashboard#create-a-payments-app-extensi... you have to be an approved Payment Partner:

 

However, the Shopify Payment Partner program is by invitation only, and since the beginning of this year things did not move beyond email ping-pong with Shopify Partners support:

I have created two popular free open source payment gateways integrations with local acquiring banks for WooCommerce. Today these solutions are used for free by more than 340+ Moldovan e-commerce businesses daily. The implementation partners and the banks recommend these solutions to their merchants and clients.

• WooCommerce maib Moldova Agroindbank Payment Gateway
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/wc-moldovaagroindbank/
  • https://github.com/alexminza/wc-moldovaagroindbank
• WooCommerce Victoriabank Payment Gateway
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/wc-victoriabank/
  • https://github.com/alexminza/wc-victoriabank

WooCommerce is an easy and quick start for small merchants, but larger e-commerce operations require features and integrations that are not properly available on this platform. Additionally, the SaaS offering by Shopify, the maturity and richness of the platform are a good potential for the growth of Moldovan merchants selling in Moldova and abroad.

If Shopify Payments does not operate in Moldova today - wouldn't it make sense for Shopify to allow the local community to create these integrations today, with local banks, to receive payments in their bank accounts in the local currency?