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?

[AlexMinza]

It has been more than 3 years since Shopify stopped allowing merchants to implement custom payment integrations with local payment providers.

This is especially limiting and painful in the markets where Shopify does not care to offer local integrations itself, nor does not allow merchants and partners to fill this gap themselves by developing custom local payments integration on their own.

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/payments/payments-extension-review

Our payments platform is available by invitation only while we continue to build out our Payments Apps API.
Shopify will open the payments platform to new applications in the future.