How to Set Up Payment Gateways So Customers Can Pay You Automatically

Getting a customer to say “I’ll take it” on WhatsApp is one thing. Getting paid for it — reliably, and without you manually checking bank alerts all day — is where most businesses lose time and orders. This guide walks through exactly how payment is configured in Whapick, so your customers can pay and your orders can move on their own.

Everything here lives in one place: Settings → Payment. If you are not sure where to start, read the Payment Mode section first — it decides which of the other settings even apply to you.

The Two Ways Customers Can Pay You

Whapick supports two fundamentally different payment flows, and you choose yours with Payment Mode. It is the first setting on the Payment page, with three options:

• Manual — you provide bank details and the customer transfers to you directly. You confirm the money landed.
• Automated — Whapick generates a payment account for each order and detects the payment automatically.
• Both — you let the customer choose between a manual transfer and the automated flow.

If you are just getting started, Manual is the fastest to set up: there are no gateway credentials to obtain, and you can be live in a few minutes. Automated is what you want once order volume grows, because it is the option that removes you from the payment loop entirely.

Setting Up Manual Payments

Choose Manual and you will see a Payment Instructions box. This is the text a customer receives when they need to pay. Write it the way you would send it to a customer yourself — the bank name, account name, account number, and anything they need to do after paying.

For example: “Transfer to 1234567890, Zenith Bank, Whapick Stores Ltd. Send your receipt here once paid.”

Keep the instructions specific and short. Vague instructions are the most common cause of customers paying the wrong account, or paying nothing because they were unsure. If you sell on WhatsApp a lot, add what happens next (“your order ships once payment is confirmed”) so the customer knows the money does not disappear into a void.

Setting Up Automated Payments with a Gateway

Automated payment means every order gets its own dedicated account, generated at the moment the customer is ready to pay. The customer transfers to that account and the system matches the payment back to the order, marks it paid, and moves the order straight on to fulfillment — no one has to screenshot a receipt or check anything by hand.

To do this, you connect a payment processor. Choose Automated (or Both) and the Payment Gateways panel appears. You will see two sections on it:

The Active Payment Processor

A dropdown listing every gateway you have connected. Whichever one is selected here is the processor customers will actually pay through. If you connect several gateways, this is where you switch between them without losing the others.

Your Configured Gateways

Each gateway you have set up, with its name and whether it is Active or Inactive. From here you can Edit a gateway or Delete one you no longer use.

Connecting a Gateway

Click Add Payment Gateway and the process is a short form:

1. Select a gateway template. The template list is maintained for you and covers the major providers Nigerian businesses use — Flutterwave, SecureWaveNG, Monnify, Paystack, PalmPay, PayVessel, PaymentPoint, Xixapay, PluzzPay, VPay, Payscribe, CrystalPay and Billstack among them.
2. Check the gateway name. It is filled in automatically from the template you picked — you do not type it, so it cannot drift from what the gateway actually is.
3. Enter your credentials. Whapick asks for exactly the fields the gateway you chose needs — no more, no less. Flutterwave, for instance, asks only for a Secret Key and Secret Hash, while Monnify asks for an API Key, Secret Key and Contract Code. The form is driven by the gateway you selected, so you will never be asked for something you do not have.
4. Leave Active ticked so the gateway is available to use, then Save.

Your credentials are encrypted before they are stored. They are never displayed back to you on screen or sent to your customers — they exist only so Whapick can talk to the gateway on your behalf.

Where to Get the Credentials

You get them from your gateway’s own dashboard, under its API or Developer settings. Each provider calls them slightly different things, so match the label on our form to the label in their dashboard:

• Flutterwave — Secret Key and Secret Hash.
• SecureWaveNG — Public Key, Secret Key, your Merchant Business ID.
• Paystack — Secret Key.
• Monnify — API Key, Secret Key and Contract Code.
• PalmPay — Secret Key and Public Key.
• VPay — API Key, plus a Username and Password.
• PayVessel, PaymentPoint, Xixapay — API Key and Secret Key.
• PluzzPay and CrystalPay — a single key.

Two rules of thumb: make sure you are copying the live keys and not the test ones once you are taking real payments, and if a key is rotated in your provider’s dashboard, come back and update it here — the old value stops working immediately.

Connecting Your Gateway’s Webhook

One step sits on your gateway’s side rather than ours, and it is the step most people miss: registering the webhook. A webhook is how the gateway tells Whapick that a customer’s transfer has actually landed. Skip it and the customer pays, but the order stays unpaid in your dashboard — because nothing ever tells us the money arrived.

Each gateway has its own webhook URL. It is not one shared address, so use the one that matches the processor you connected:

• Flutterwave — https://whapick.com/api/webhook/flutterwave
• SecureWaveNG — https://whapick.com/api/webhook/securewaveng

Log in to your provider’s dashboard, open its webhook or developer settings, and paste the matching URL into the webhook URL field. Then save.

Flutterwave: Set Your Secret Hash

Flutterwave does not sign its notifications with your API Secret Key. Instead it echoes back a Secret Hash that you choose yourself, and Whapick checks that the value it receives matches the one stored against your gateway. So you set it in two places, and both must be identical:

1. In Whapick, when you connect Flutterwave (Settings → Payment → Add Payment Gateway) you are asked for the Secret Hash alongside the Secret Key. Generate a long, random string and enter it here.
2. In your Flutterwave dashboard, under Settings → Webhooks, paste the webhook URL above and enter the exact same value in the Secret Hash field.

Generate a fresh random string for this — do not reuse an API key or a password. A long, unpredictable value is the entire point: it is what proves a notification genuinely came from Flutterwave. If the two values differ, or you leave the Secret Hash empty on Flutterwave’s side, Flutterwave sends notifications with no verification header at all and every one is rejected. The customer’s payment succeeds, but the order quietly stays unpaid.

SecureWaveNG: Allowlist Our IP Address

SecureWaveNG protects its merchants by delivering notifications only from IP addresses you have approved, so this gateway needs one extra step beyond the webhook URL. Add both of these in your SecureWaveNG dashboard:

• Webhook URL — https://whapick.com/api/webhook/securewaveng
• IP address to allowlist — 159.100.20.192

If this IP is missing, SecureWaveNG refuses our requests outright and no account is ever generated for the customer to pay into. You will see the payment fail with a message quoting the IP address that is not whitelisted. Add the URL and the IP, then save.

If a Payment Is Not Confirming

Almost every “the customer paid but the order is still unpaid” case comes down to one of these three things:

• The webhook URL is missing, mistyped, or pointed at the wrong gateway.
• Flutterwave — the Secret Hash on your Flutterwave dashboard does not match the one saved in Whapick.
• SecureWaveNG — our IP 159.100.20.192 is not on your allowlist.

Each gateway’s dashboard keeps a log of webhook deliveries, so you can see whether Whapick is receiving them. If a test transfer never appears there, re-check the webhook URL first, then the Secret Hash (Flutterwave) or the IP allowlist (SecureWaveNG).

How Payment Connects to an Order

Understanding this makes troubleshooting far easier. When a customer completes an order in your WhatsApp flow, Whapick creates the order and asks the gateway for a payment account for it. The customer is sent the account details. When the transfer arrives, the gateway tells Whapick, the payment is matched back to that specific order, and the order is marked as paid and sent to fulfillment.

Because the payment is tied to the order rather than to a screenful of bank alerts, nothing needs to be reconciled by hand. This is also why an automated gateway is worth the setup cost: the customer gets instant confirmation and you get an order that fulfils itself.

A Note on Wallet Balance and Store Credit

There is a second, separate money flow worth knowing about, because it confuses people at first. Collecting payment from your customers uses the gateways on this page. Funding your own account balance — for your subscription, top-ups and platform usage — is handled separately, and it never touches your customer-facing gateway settings. Setting up a gateway for your customers has no effect on how you pay for your plan, and vice versa.

If you hold money on behalf of a regular customer, Whapick also supports a per-contact store credit you can fund from the dashboard. That customer can then spend their balance on orders instead of transferring each time — useful for resellers and repeat buyers. Again, this is independent of the gateway configuration described above.

A Short Checklist Before You Go Live

• Payment Mode chosen deliberately — Manual if you are just starting, Automated once volume justifies it.
• Manual instructions written out clearly, with the account details and what happens next.
• At least one gateway connected and set as the Active Payment Processor (needed for Automated or Both).
• Live credentials entered, not test credentials.
• Webhook URL registered in your gateway’s dashboard — plus your Flutterwave Secret Hash in both places, or our IP 159.100.20.192 allowlisted for SecureWaveNG.
• A small real order placed to confirm payment is detected and the order progresses.

That is the whole setup. It takes a few minutes for manual payments and a little longer for automated ones, and after that your customers can pay without you being in the middle of it.