01Payments built around telebirr and local wallets
Stripe does not support Ethiopian businesses, so an online shop or fees portal that relies on it will simply not work for most buyers. Ethio Telecom reports more than 60 million telebirr customers, and gateways such as Chapa bring telebirr, CBE Birr, Awash Birr, M-Pesa, cards and PayPal together behind one integration in ETB or USD. SantimPay, licensed by the National Bank of Ethiopia as a payment gateway operator, is another route. We choose the gateway with you, build the checkout around the methods your customers actually hold, and test every confirmation and refund path before launch.
02Hosting decisions shaped by Proclamation No. 1321/2024
Article 22 of the Personal Data Protection Proclamation, titled Data Sovereignty, requires controllers and processors to ensure personal data is stored on a server or data centre in Ethiopia, and cross-border transfers are permitted only under set conditions. The Ethiopian Communications Authority regulates the law, opened a registration portal in late 2025 and still has directives pending. We do not give legal advice, but we raise these points at scoping, map which forms collect personal data, and plan hosting, backups and third-party tools so your legal adviser has a clear picture to approve.
03Dates, times and languages that read correctly
Ethiopia's civil calendar has thirteen months, and many people count the hours from dawn, so a published time can be misread by six hours. For event pages, admissions deadlines and class timetables we make the calendar explicit, and where it helps we show both Ethiopian and Gregorian dates. Amharic and Tigrinya use the Ge'ez script, and Oromo, Somali and Afar are also federal working languages. We test fonts, menus and search in every language you publish, rather than assuming English-only layouts will hold.
04What we build on WordPress
Our work runs from strategy and design through custom development to long-term care. That includes company websites and redesigns, WooCommerce stores, membership and learning platforms, portals and dashboards, integrations with the systems you already run, migrations from other platforms, and managed hosting through our partners Cloudways and Hostinger. Strategy and design starts from $1,500 per project, development from $5,000 per project, migrations from $1,000 per migration and managed services from $2,000 per year, always confirmed in a written scope.
05Working with a team in another time zone
Addis Ababa runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, two hours ahead of Lagos, with no daylight saving change on either side. That gives a full shared working day: a 10am meeting in Addis is 8am for us. We work through scheduled calls, shared project boards and written updates, so decisions are recorded and nobody waits on an inbox. You keep ownership of your domain, hosting account and code from the first day.
