DPO Group (Zambia)
DPO Group is the payment gateway Zambian developers name most often for card acceptance, and simultaneously the one they complain about most. Both of those things have been true for three years.
At a glance
| Supports | Cards (Visa/Mastercard) and mobile money |
| Setup fee | None reported. Free test environment. |
| Transaction fee | Unknown — never publicly quoted. See open questions. |
| Settlement | T+1 to T+2 reported; auto-settles above ~$100 balance (2023) |
| API style | SOAP XML |
| Integrations | WooCommerce, Shopify |
| Ownership | Kenyan-founded, acquired PayGate (South Africa); operates across Africa |
Why people use it anyway
- It is one of very few options that still processes cards in Zambia. See card payments.
- No setup fee and a free sandbox — confirmed by four separate people after one contrary report.
- Scale. It is described as the largest payment group in Africa, and Airtel Zambia itself uses DPO to collect payments for its 5G broadband routers and data — including for Airtel Money payments, via a merchant account on DPO.
- Available on Shopify, where local alternatives generally are not.
The complaints
These are consistent across years and across different merchants.
Settlement and withdrawal delays. The single most repeated operational complaint. “The pain point seems to be withdrawing collected funds. It takes loooong” (Feb 2024). One merchant reported a settlement outstanding for over a month (Oct 2023).
A long-standing notification bug. From a merchant using DPO since 2017, reported April 2026:
DPO takes the money from the client but never tells my platform it’s done so. Transaction is marked as failed on my site. They’ve been “working on it” since Oct 2022.
Their mitigation, which is good advice for any Zambian gateway: make the integration asynchronous, allow enough time for the user to enter their PIN, and poll transaction status several times a minute rather than trusting a webhook to arrive.
Onboarding friction. Reports range from smooth to impossible, and appear to depend heavily on whether your paperwork is exactly in order:
| Report | Date |
|---|---|
| ”It’s taking them forever to send our live keys… The KYC verification too forever.” | Oct 2023 |
| ”I tried setting up an account with them. I won’t lie it’s hectic. Going back and forth. I never even succeeded.” | Aug 2024 |
| ”Been three weeks… Was not accepting my documents upload then the lady would respond every week to one of my emails.” | Nov 2024 |
| ”DPO rejected me get go kaya why” — despite “all my company documents in order” | Feb 2026 |
| ”I did registration a few months ago, it was a smooth process.” | Jan 2026 |
| ”DPO only reject if your paper is not in order… they are so far the best.” | Feb 2026 |
Checkout experience. Customers are redirected off your site to DPO’s hosted page, re-enter details they already gave you, and land on a page carrying DPO’s own advertising — which merchants report confuses customers into thinking they have been sent somewhere unrelated.
There is a real counter-argument, made in the group: African customers often trust a redirect to a branded third-party page more than an in-site form, which is precisely why PayPal built its flow that way.
Support. Merchants report that Zambian support is thin — a country manager and a sales rep, with actual technical help coming from other countries.
Sentiment over time
Worth noting because it is unusual: DPO’s reputation fell while its market share rose.
- 2023 — “more reliable than Flutterwave”… and also “DPO is a death penalty” and “seems like a scam at this point”
- 2024 — grudging default; T+2 and cash-out issues widely discussed
- 2025 — “I’m so very tired of DPO. They have been so bad this year”; “I’ve been using DPO since 2017 and have had it with them”
- 2026 — “Yeah I’m so very close to firing DPO” — from a merchant who is still using it, because the alternatives for cards stopped working
Open questions
- What does DPO charge per transaction? Asked in September 2023 and never answered by anyone, anywhere, in three years of community archives. This is the single biggest gap on this page.
- What is the current settlement SLA, and the minimum settlement threshold?
- Is the transaction-notification bug still open?
If you have a DPO merchant account, your pricing schedule would answer the first question for everyone. Open a PR.