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Selcom ​

Selcom is a payment gateway for Tanzania. It gives your customers a single checkout page that accepts the local mobile money wallets and cards Selcom supports.

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 ​

When the customer chooses Selcom at checkout, Powerlynx creates the order and sends them to Selcom's own payment page, where they complete the payment with their preferred method.

The customer is asked for their phone number during checkout if Powerlynx does not already have one on file for them.

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.

TIP

A voucher is never issued on the strength of the customer's return to Powerlynx, and not on Selcom's notification either. Powerlynx always confirms the payment by asking Selcom for the order status, and it re-checks on a schedule. That means a payment still completes if the customer closes the browser on Selcom's page, and a notification that never arrives cannot leave a paid order unfulfilled.

Networking: Walled Garden ​

Another crucial step is to configure the allow list of hosts on your hotspot. Because the customer's browser leaves Powerlynx for Selcom's payment page, the hotspot must let that traffic through before the customer has internet access. For instance, if you've connected a Mikrotik hotspot using this manual, you need to allow the Powerlynx hosts and everything Selcom's checkout page depends on. You can find more about Mikrotik Walled Garden here.

To do this, access your router, open the Terminal, and run:

/ip hotspot walled-garden
add dst-host=*.powerlynx.app
add dst-host=*selcom*
add dst-host=*cloudflare*
add dst-host=*elb.amazonaws.com
add dst-host=code.jquery.com
add dst-host=*ipqscdn.com
/ip hotspot walled-garden
add dst-host=*.powerlynx.app
add dst-host=*selcom*
add dst-host=*cloudflare*
add dst-host=*elb.amazonaws.com
add dst-host=code.jquery.com
add dst-host=*ipqscdn.com

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