Integrating CIB and Edahabia online payment

For years the answer to "why not sell online in Algeria" was that nobody had a card. That answer is no longer true, and the figures GIE Monétique published for 2025 show it without ambiguity.

What changed is not only the number of cards in circulation. It is the amount people are now willing to pay with them, how often they do it, and above all the fact that the supply of online merchants remains tiny against the demand.

This article sets out what those figures say, what is actually required to accept a card payment on your site, how long it takes, and what has to be in place on the site itself for the payment to go through.

Every amount quoted comes from GIE Monétique’s 2025 balance sheet, printed under each chart. We publish no client figure and no in-house estimate dressed up as a statistic.

There are 21,899,581 cards in circulation, up 9%. They split into 17,655,039 Edahabia cards, issued by Algérie Poste, and 4,244,542 CIB cards, issued by the banks.

The proportion matters more than the total. Edahabia is roughly four cards in five, and it is the one growing, at 13%, while CIB is close to flat. A site accepting only CIB would be addressing fewer than one cardholder in five.

It is also a difference of population, not merely of volume. The typical Edahabia holder is not necessarily banked in the conventional sense; they are often an employee, a pensioner or a student whose account is with Algérie Poste. Not accepting Edahabia means excluding that group in particular.

A practical consequence, often overlooked when choosing a technical provider: the two cards do not behave identically in a checkout. The authentication journeys differ, so do the error messages, and a checkout tested with only one of them goes live with half its cases unverified. Ask explicitly for both to be tested before launch.

A commercial consequence of this split, rarely drawn: if your customers are mostly employees, pensioners or students, Edahabia is not a secondary option, it is your main payment method. Ranking it first in the checkout display — the most widely held card first — is a one-line change that removes a hesitation at the most fragile moment.

The file is not put together in an afternoon, and most of the delay comes from administrative documents you already hold. You need an up-to-date commercial register entry, a business bank account in the company’s name, a tax identification number, and a site that genuinely exists with its terms of sale published.

Your bank is your counterpart, not the platform. The bank assembles the file, submits it, and it is with the bank that the commission is negotiated. Choosing the bank before choosing the technical provider is the order that saves the most time.

What blocks files most often is none of those: it is the exact match between the trading name on the commercial register, the one on the bank account, and the one shown on the site. Three slightly different spellings are enough to send the file back.

Plan also for who inside your business will carry the file. It is not a technical task and it cannot be delegated to an outside supplier: your company signs, and the bank will deal with whoever has authority to commit. The file that drags is nearly always the one nobody was explicitly given.

Abandonment does not happen at the card. It happens earlier, on three screens: the one where a delivery charge appears for the first time, the one demanding an account be created, and the one asking again for information already given.

A delivery charge revealed last is the leading cause of abandonment everywhere it has been measured, and the mechanism is simple: the customer did the arithmetic in their head, it is changed at the last moment, and they start thinking again. Showing the total cost from the product page appears to cost a few sales and recovers more.

Mandatory account creation is second. A customer buying once has no reason to create a login, and asking for one at the moment of payment turns a purchase into a registration. Guest checkout is an hour of configuration.

A fourth loss, quieter, is worth watching: the screen that asks again for a phone number it already accepted, or rejects a format without saying which one it wants. Checkout error messages are written by developers for developers, and they are the only sentences on the site a customer reads at the exact moment they are considering giving up.

We start with the file, not the code, because the file governs the calendar. We check the exact match between the trading name on the commercial register, the bank account and the site — the divergence that sends files back — and hand you the list of missing documents before the bank hands it to you.

While the review runs, we prepare the site: the four pages acceptance makes mandatory, a checkout with no forced account creation, and the total cost shown from the product page. These are fixes worth making even if the file were refused, which is why we make them during the wait rather than after it.

We then integrate the payment and test both cards, CIB and Edahabia, separately and all the way through — including the failure cases, which are the ones nobody checks and the ones your customers will meet. You receive the record of those tests, not just a confirmation that "it works".

Finally we put in place the three readings that will tell you whether the integration helped: card-paid orders, average basket compared, payment failure rate. We promise no figure in advance, for the reason stated across our pages: we do not publish client results, and we will not invent one to sell you an integration.