How M-Pesa STK push works on your store

Your store sends a request to Safaricom's Daraja API with the amount and the customer's phone number. Safaricom pushes a PIN prompt to that phone. When the customer confirms, Safaricom processes the payment and sends the result back to your store through a callback URL.

The order should only be marked paid when that callback confirms success, not when the prompt is sent. This is the single most common mistake we see: stores that assume payment happened because the prompt appeared.

Callbacks arrive asynchronously, sometimes seconds later, sometimes after a retry. If your store has no reliable callback handler, or the callback URL is not publicly reachable, the money leaves the customer's account but the order never updates. The customer is charged and sees nothing.

A production-grade integration reconciles every transaction: it records the checkout request, waits for the callback, and also queries Safaricom directly for any transaction that has not resolved. Nothing is left to chance.

A publicly reachable HTTPS callback endpoint, idempotent handling so a repeated callback does not double-count an order, a status query fallback, and clear customer messaging while the payment settles. Get those right and M-Pesa checkout becomes the smoothest part of the buying experience.