Stripe Expands Payment Options in Nigeria: Local Currency Payments Now Available for U.S. Merchants
Stripe, the global financial infrastructure platform, has introduced a new feature allowing its U.S. merchants to accept payments in Nigeria’s local currency, the naira. This development is part of Stripe’s broader effort to make international commerce more accessible and seamless for its clients.
With this new feature, Nigerian shoppers can now pay for goods and services in naira, while merchants, such as U.S.-based retailer Amazon, will receive settlements in their home currency, such as the U.S. dollar. Previously, businesses needed to establish a legal entity in each country where they intended to accept payments, a requirement that often limited their global reach and led to high rates of cart abandonment by potential customers.
Stripe’s latest roll-out eliminates this obstacle, enabling merchants to sell directly to Nigerian customers without the need to create a Nigerian company. For now, this feature is available only to U.S. retailers, with settlements in USD, as part of its beta launch.
“Online payments are, among other things, a conversion optimization problem,” Stripe noted in its 2023 annual letter. The company has long recognized that the ability to pay in local currency is crucial for reducing cart abandonment and increasing revenue. According to the Baymard Institute, which has tracked global cart abandonment rates for over a decade, 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned at checkout, often due to currency mismatches between the merchant’s pricing and the shopper’s local currency.
By presenting prices in the local currency, Stripe aims to improve conversion rates for its merchants, enabling them to capture more sales and grow their businesses globally. This new feature aligns with Stripe’s mission to “grow the GDP of the internet,” a goal that the company is steadily approaching with a total payment volume of $1 trillion in the past year—equivalent to 1% of global GDP.
