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Selcom ​

Selcom is a payment gateway for Tanzania. It lets your customers pay from the local mobile money wallets Selcom supports — M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa and Halopesa. Selcom sends a payment prompt straight to the customer's phone, and the customer approves it with their wallet PIN; there is no separate payment website to open.

Card payments are not available through Selcom.

To set up Selcom in Powerlynx, ensure you've selected Tanzania under Config/System/Localization. The gateway only appears in the payment gateway list when your country is Tanzania.

Selcom settles in TZS only. The currency is not a field you fill in — Powerlynx takes it from your localization settings and refuses payments in any other currency.

Configuration ​

Open Config → Finance → Payment gateways and click the action button next to Selcom.

You will need three values from your Selcom merchant onboarding. If you do not have them, contact Selcom merchant support — they are not self-service.

Fill in the following fields:

  • Vendor ID — your Selcom vendor (float account) identifier, issued when your merchant account is created.
  • API key — the API key issued with your merchant account.
  • API secret — the signing secret Selcom issued alongside the key. Powerlynx uses it to sign every request, so it must match exactly.
  • Environment — Production or Sandbox. Selcom normally issues production credentials directly and only provides sandbox access on request, so leave this on Production unless Selcom gave you separate sandbox credentials.

Pay attention to the Location filter — you can configure your Selcom account as the default for the system (all locations use this account), or select a specific location and link the account only to that one. This lets different locations collect into different merchant accounts.

Press Apply to save.

Enable Payment Gateway for a Location ​

The next crucial step is to enable Selcom for a specific location. Navigate to Locations, select the desired location, and open the "Payment Gateways" tab. From there, enable Selcom for this location.

If it's disabled, your clients will not have the option to pay with Selcom.

Buying a voucher with Selcom ​

Selcom does not send your customer to a payment website. The customer stays on Powerlynx the whole time, and the payment is approved on their phone:

  1. The customer chooses Selcom as the payment method on the splash page.

  2. If Powerlynx does not already have a phone number on file for them, they are asked to enter one — that number is where the payment prompt is sent.

  3. The customer sees a "payment pending" page, and Selcom sends a payment prompt for the exact amount to their phone.

  4. The customer enters their wallet PIN on the phone. Within about 15–30 seconds the pending page moves on and their internet access starts.

INFO

A phone number entered at that prompt is used for the payment only. It is passed to Selcom with the order and discarded when the session ends — it is never saved on the customer's record.

If the customer does not approve the prompt within 15 minutes, the payment fails and the pending page shows an error with the option to try again. Trying again starts a new payment and sends a new prompt to the phone. Reloading the pending page does not send a second prompt.

Minimum payment: TZS 200 ​

Selcom does not accept payments below TZS 200. If a data plan costs less, the customer sees "Selcom cannot accept this amount. The minimum payment is TZS 200." and nothing is sent to their phone. Make sure every plan you sell through Selcom is priced at TZS 200 or more.

TIP

A voucher is never issued on the strength of the customer's browser or of Selcom's notification alone. Powerlynx always confirms the payment by asking Selcom for the order status, and checks the amount Selcom reports. That means a payment still completes if the customer closes the browser after approving the prompt, and a notification that never arrives cannot leave a paid order unfulfilled.

Networking: Walled Garden ​

Because the customer never leaves Powerlynx and the payment prompt reaches the phone over the mobile network, you don't need to add any Selcom hosts to your hotspot's walled garden. Your hotspot only needs to let the Powerlynx pages themselves through. For instance, if you've connected a Mikrotik hotspot using this manual, access your router, open the Terminal, and run:

/ip hotspot walled-garden
add dst-host=*.digitaloceanspaces.com
add dst-host=*.powerlynx.app
/ip hotspot walled-garden
add dst-host=*.digitaloceanspaces.com
add dst-host=*.powerlynx.app

If you added Selcom hosts to your walled garden earlier, you can leave them — they do no harm. You can find more about Mikrotik Walled Garden here.

It might be useful to visit our forum, especially this topic, to discuss all questions related to the walled garden.