Checking payments by hand, or with an API
Should I verify Ethiopian payments by hand or use a service?
Checking by hand is the right answer at low volume. Every Ethiopian bank publishes a receipt page, opening it yourself costs nothing, and at a few payments a day the discipline matters far more than the tooling. It stops scaling for three reasons: it needs a person present, it keeps no record of which references you have already accepted, so reused receipts get through, and it gets skipped exactly when the shop is busy, which is when fraud is easiest. If you are checking more than a handful a day, or more than one person is doing it, the record is worth more than the automation.
The case for checking by hand
- It is free, and it will stay free. The bank publishes the receipt and you read it, with nothing in between.
- It has no dependencies. No account, no key, no service to be down, no bill to forget.
- At low volume it is genuinely enough. A shop taking three transfers a day, checked properly every time, is not the problem this industry exists to solve.
Side by side
| checking by hand | links.et | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, plus the time of whoever is doing it. | Free to 200 receipts a month, then from 499 ETB. Repeat checks and failed lookups are not charged. |
| Reused receipts | Not caught, unless somebody remembers the reference. A genuine receipt shown twice passes both times. | Your own verification history is kept, so a reference you have already accepted is one you can check against. |
| Wrong receiver | Caught only if the person checking reads past the status line. Most do not. | The receiver comes back as a field, so it can be compared rather than noticed. |
| When it is busy | Skipped. This is the real failure mode, and it is not a discipline problem. | A few seconds and the same for everyone, so there is less reason to skip it. |
| In your own software | Not possible without writing a fetcher and parser per bank, then maintaining them. | One HTTP call, one JSON shape for every provider. |
When not to use links.et
If you take a few transfers a day, always from the same bank, and one person checks every one of them properly, keep doing that. You do not need this, and paying for it would buy you a record you are not going to read.
Try it before you decide
Paste a real receipt link or reference and see what comes back. No account needed.