Accepting online payments on a Tunisian website: what are the options in 2026?

Stripe and the big international gateways don't open merchant accounts in Tunisia. To take card payments on a Tunisian website, you go through ClicToPay via your bank, or through a local gateway such as Paymee, Konnect or Flouci. The choice comes down to three concrete points: who accepts foreign cards, what commission you pay, and how many weeks the bank paperwork costs you before the first transaction.

Why Stripe doesn't solve the problem

It's the first question I get, and the answer is short. Stripe's global availability page doesn't list Tunisia. Across the whole African continent, it only mentions Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa — and even then through the extended Paystack network (Stripe, Global availability). Morocco and Algeria aren't there either.

Some people work around it by setting up a company in Estonia or France. It works — for a business that only sells abroad. For a Tunisian SME invoicing Tunisian customers in dinars, it's one more legal entity to manage for a problem that can be solved locally.

ClicToPay: the banking route, the slowest and the most widely accepted

ClicToPay is the secure online payment solution built on the Tunisian card network and distributed by banks. STB's product page says it accepts "Tunisian bank cards (CIB, Visa and MasterCard) and foreign cards (Visa and MasterCard)", and spells out the prerequisites: be a customer of the bank, be a merchant established in Tunisia, have a website, sign a membership contract for the secure online payment system plus a membership form, then go through a testing phase with SMT before going live (STB, Clic to Pay).

Note what the page doesn't say: there's no price list. The commission is negotiated at the branch and depends on your volume. If a provider quotes you a ClicToPay rate over the phone without having seen your file, they're improvising.

Paymee, Konnect, Flouci: faster to plug in

Paymee publishes its rates, which is rare enough to point out: 1.9% on domestic cards (Visa, Mastercard, e-dinar) and 2.9% on international cards, with the note "No fixed or subscription fees. Paymee takes a commission per payment" (Paymee, Tarifs).

On the integration side, Konnect documents its API publicly, and it's the most readable of the lot. A payment is initiated with a POST /payments/init-payment authenticated by an x-api-key header, with only two required parameters — receiverWalletId and amount. Accepted currencies are TND, EUR and USD, with non-TND payments converted automatically. The payment methods enabled by default are the wallet, bank_card and e-DINAR. The response returns a payUrl and a paymentRef, and a webhook parameter receives the payment notification via GET (Konnect Network, Payment initiation API).

One detail that's expensive to discover in production: for TND, the amount is expressed in millimes. A 49.900 TND order is sent as 49900. The factor-of-1,000 mistake, in either direction, is the classic first-integration bug.

What it means over 100 orders

Take an average basket of 120 TND and 100 orders in a month, all paid with Tunisian cards. At the published 1.9% rate, the commission comes to 228 TND on 12,000 TND collected. That's a calculation derived from Paymee's published rate, not a figure provided by the company — your actual terms may differ depending on your contract.

The gap with ClicToPay isn't measured there. It's measured in time: a gateway gets you live in a few days, the bank file takes weeks. On an e-commerce project, that's the difference between launching before peak season and missing it.

What if my customers pay from France or Canada?

International cards go through, at a higher rate — 2.9% with Paymee. Konnect accepts EUR and USD with automatic conversion. That's the incoming direction, and it's fairly well covered.

The outgoing direction is far more constrained, and that's what SMEs discover afterwards. To pay for foreign hosting, an ad platform or a SaaS subscription from Tunisia, you need an international technology card. The Ministry of Communication Technologies' factsheet sets the annual caps at 1,000 dinars for individuals and 10,000 dinars for legal entities, based on BCT circular to authorised intermediaries no. 2016-9 of 30 December 2016 (MTC, International technology card). Labelled startups get an annual allowance raised to 100,000 dinars, on presentation of the currently valid label award decision (Circular to authorised intermediaries no. 2019-02 of 30 January 2019).

In other words: you can collect foreign currency without trouble, but your ability to spend foreign currency is capped. An ambitious Google Ads budget hits that ceiling before it hits anything else.

What I recommend, concretely

Launch with a local gateway — Paymee or Konnect — and open the ClicToPay file in parallel the same day. You collect payments while the bank processes your application. When ClicToPay is ready, add it as a second payment method rather than replacing the first: Tunisian customers used to the ClicToPay logo look for it, while those paying from abroad don't care.

And keep in mind that the real bottleneck isn't technical. Plugging in a payment API is a day of development. Gathering the membership contract, the form and the supporting documents, then passing acceptance testing with SMT — that's the rest of the project. On the CS-Cart forum, a merchant described exactly this in November 2024: he wasn't looking for documentation, he was looking for someone to implement it (CS-Cart Forums, Payment gateway integration - Tunisia).