PayFort stopped being a brand in December 2020. Amazon bought it in 2017 as part of the Souq Group acquisition, ran it under the old name for three years, then renamed it Amazon Payment Services across the Middle East and North Africa. Same regional acquiring, new name on the door. In the UAE the company holds a Retail Payment Services licence from the Central Bank of the UAE, announced in late 2023.
The thing you cannot look up is the number you came for. There is a pricing page, and what it gives you is a starting figure attached to a volume band, not a rate card that tells a Dubai salon or a fit-out contractor what they will actually sign. The contract rate arrives after a salesperson has seen your trade licence, your monthly volume and your merchant category code. That is normal for UAE acquiring, and it is worth understanding properly, because the percentage everyone argues about is rarely the line that costs the most.
We do not sell payment gateways, we are not one, and nobody named on this page pays us anything. We connect gateways to the systems that have to react when money lands, and we run that wiring on our own studio bookings before putting it in front of a client.
What happened to PayFort, and why the old name keeps showing up
The payments arm traded as PayFort until the December 2020 rebrand. Acquiring relationships, merchant book and regional coverage carried over. What changed was ownership branding and, over the following years, the product set around it.
The old name survives in code. The Adobe Commerce module is still published as amazonpaymentservices-module-fort, plenty of developer documentation and Stack Overflow answers still carry Fort parameter names, and any checkout built in 2018 or 2019 will sit in a folder called fort. If you inherited a site from a previous developer and the payment integration says PayFort, you are on this provider and the merchant portal is Amazon Payment Services. Nothing needs migrating for that reason alone.
Coverage is regional. The company's own material describes around nine MENA markets, and the ones that matter to most readers here are the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, because that is where the local rails it connects to actually live. Alongside Visa and Mastercard it supports local schemes: mada in Saudi Arabia, KNET in Kuwait, NAPS in Qatar, Meeza in Egypt. Amex, Apple Pay and instalment options are part of the offering by the company's own account, with availability varying by market and merchant category, so confirm the exact list for your country before you build a checkout around one of them.
For a UAE business selling only to UAE customers, none of that regional depth is decisive. For a UAE business that also sells into Riyadh and Cairo, it is most of the argument.
What it does technically
Hosted checkout redirects the customer to the provider's payment page, which keeps card data off your servers and out of your PCI scope. That is the fastest route live and the one most small merchants should take.
Merchant page integration keeps the form on your own site, with the sensitive fields handled by the provider. More control, more engineering, more responsibility.
Payment links and invoices let you charge without a checkout at all. You generate a link for an amount, send it, the customer pays on the hosted page. This is how most service businesses in Dubai actually collect, because the sale happens in a chat rather than in a basket.
Recurring billing works through tokenisation. The first payment captures consent and stores a token, then each renewal charges against that token on your schedule. The part worth checking during setup is failure handling: an expired card should trigger a retry and a notification, not a silent drop that you notice two months later after delivering the service free.
There is a REST API with webhooks on payment status, plus plugins for the common platforms including WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento. The webhook is the piece that decides whether you need a person watching a dashboard every morning, and almost nobody wires it properly on the first attempt.
One boundary worth naming: no gateway on this market posts a link into a WhatsApp thread by itself, and Amazon Payment Services is no exception. It generates the link. Getting that link in front of the customer seconds after they ask for it is a separate build.
What it costs, and why the rate is quoted rather than published
Reported figures circulating at the time of writing put the merchant service fee starting near 2.8% for merchants above roughly AED 500,000 in annual card volume, with a monthly plan charge reported somewhere between AED 200 and AED 355 depending on tier and any discount applied, a fixed fee of around AED 1 per transaction, a reduced fixed fee near AED 0.95 on higher volume tiers, and an introductory waiver of the fixed fee for the first three months capped around AED 450. Treat every one of those as reported and dated, not as your quote. Ask for the schedule attached to your merchant agreement, in writing, before you sign anything.
The reason a headline rate tells you so little is that the price of accepting a card in the UAE is assembled from separate lines, and providers move different ones.
The percentage of the transaction, the merchant service charge, is the line everyone compares. It moves with your monthly volume and with your merchant category code, because the acquirer is pricing the risk that you take money and fail to deliver. Professional services, retail with immediate delivery, travel with a six-month delivery window: three different risk profiles, three different rates from the same provider.
The fixed fee per transaction decides more than owners expect. AED 1 on an AED 25 sale is another 4% on top of the percentage. On an AED 4,000 invoice it rounds to nothing. Two businesses with identical revenue and different average order values should not sign the same plan, and the one selling small tickets should negotiate hardest on the fixed fee rather than the percentage.
A monthly plan fee or minimum turns a variable cost into a fixed one. At AED 300 a month against AED 20,000 processed, that is another 1.5% on your blended rate. At AED 400,000 processed it disappears.
International cards cost more than domestic ones everywhere in this market, and a charge in a currency other than AED adds a conversion spread on top, usually around 1%. If a third of your buyers pay on foreign cards, your effective rate sits well above the number you were quoted, and a ranking built from three pricing pages can invert completely.
Refunds and chargebacks carry their own charges. Ask specifically whether the original transaction fee is returned on a refund, because often it is not. Dispute fees across UAE providers sit roughly between AED 50 and AED 150 per case, charged whether you win or lose, and this figure almost never appears on a public pricing page.
Settlement speed is a price, even though it never appears as a line item. Money sitting in a provider balance for seven days instead of two is working capital you cannot use. Settlement and payout are also two different events on two different clocks, and weekends and public holidays are not neutral. A UAE business that sells hardest on Friday and Saturday waits longer than any settlement table suggests.
The honest way to compare providers is to take one real month of your own transactions, apply each written quote to it including the fixed fee and the international card share, and compare blended effective rates. That takes about twenty minutes with an export and gives you a genuine negotiating position. Every comparison built on published percentages alone is guesswork wearing a spreadsheet.
What a UAE merchant needs, and what stalls the review
The document file is close to identical across UAE gateways, because the acquiring bank behind them carries the risk if your business is not what it claimed.
You need a valid UAE trade licence, mainland or free zone, with a listed activity that matches what your website visibly sells. You need a corporate bank account with an AED IBAN in the exact name of the licensed entity. Personal accounts are refused. You need Emirates ID, passport and visa pages for the authorised signatory and the ultimate beneficial owners, plus the memorandum and articles. And you need a live website carrying prices, a refund and cancellation policy, delivery or service terms, and a real contact route, because a reviewer opens it and reads it.
What slows the file down, in the order I see it happen: an activity mismatch, where a management consultancy licence points at a supplements store and the reviewer cannot classify the merchant; an IBAN whose account name differs from the licensed entity, which passes application review and then fails at the first payout, leaving money parked while tickets bounce between three parties; an expired residence visa on the signatory, which stops everything; a website that is password-protected or half-built, so the reviewer has nothing to verify; and a missing refund policy, which is the cheapest of all these to fix and the one most often skipped.
On timing, the industry practice in this market is a first response within a few working days on a clean file, with the full path to a first live payment running longer when a bank step or an underwriting question is involved. Nobody, including the provider's own sales team, should promise you a date before seeing your documents. Higher-risk categories and any model where you collect far ahead of delivery add weeks, not days.
Who it fits, and who should look elsewhere
It fits a business already selling across more than one MENA market, where mada, KNET or Meeza acceptance from a single integration removes a genuine problem. It fits merchants who want instalment options at checkout on higher tickets. It fits recurring billing on tokenised cards, and it fits volume, because negotiated pricing rewards it. Sitting behind Amazon also shortens some conversations with finance teams and procurement departments that want a familiar name on a supplier form.
It fits badly if you want a rate this afternoon without speaking to anyone. It fits badly at very low average order values, where the fixed fee dominates and a plan fee at low volume makes the blended rate ugly. If you are a freelancer with no trade licence, no UAE gateway of this type will onboard you, and app-based providers are the honest answer. And if your customers are in India, the whole category is the wrong shelf, which is a separate mess I have written up in what actually works instead of Razorpay from the UAE.
The alternatives, briefly
Telr and PayTabs are the common link-first choices for UAE SMBs, both easy to start, both fine without a developer, PayTabs stronger on Arabic checkout and Gulf-wide invoicing. Stripe has the best documentation of the group and the slowest default settlement, and it requires a UAE trade licence like everyone else. Network International through N-Genius is the one your bank is most likely to name, negotiated pricing, onboarding measured in weeks because it runs a bank approval cycle, worth the wait at serious volume. Ziina and the app-based providers take the bottom of the market, where a freelancer needs a link and a QR code, at the cost of a thin API. Tabby and Tamara are a different product entirely: a conversion tool for retail baskets, priced well above card rates and quoted per merchant, so comparing their percentage against a gateway percentage produces a broken comparison.
Fees, settlement windows and onboarding traps for the main three are laid out properly in our Telr vs PayTabs vs Stripe comparison, and the wider UAE field sits in our Dubai payment gateway overview. No point repeating either here.
What happens after the payment clears
Choosing a gateway is a one-week decision that people stretch over two months. The loop around it runs every day for years, and that is where the money goes.
Once the money clears, someone still has to mark the deal paid in the CRM with the right amount attached, send the confirmation, lock the slot or the stock so it cannot be sold twice, issue the invoice, chase the person who received a link four hours ago and never opened it, and check at the end of the day that what the bank received matches what the CRM believes. A person spending 60 to 90 minutes a day on that costs roughly AED 2,000 a month in Dubai salary terms, for work a machine does in milliseconds. The revenue side is worse: slow follow-up on unpaid links and cold enquiries costs a small business somewhere around AED 4,100 a month. Set that against the fee difference you were agonising over, where 0.4% on AED 100,000 processed is AED 400.
The mechanics that make it run without a person are not complicated, and they are the same regardless of which provider you signed. Generate the link by API with the amount and the deal reference pre-filled. Drop it into the conversation where the customer said yes, seconds after they said it. Catch the webhook, verify its signature so a "paid" status cannot be spoofed by anyone who guesses your endpoint, and key on the transaction reference rather than the amount, because a 50% deposit against an AED 10,000 invoice will otherwise sit in limbo forever. Handle the refund event too, or a customer refunded on Monday gets chased for money on Wednesday. Then reconcile nightly against the provider's own report.
That last one we learned the hard way. Two sync bugs left about AED 15,000 of paid bookings flagged unpaid for weeks on our own system. The payment portal looked fine, the chat looked fine, only the CRM was wrong, and the CRM is what the follow-up sequences read. The nightly job exists because of that fortnight.
The same contour now runs our studio side at AED 67,600 net a month with ads at roughly 5x ROAS, and it behaves identically at 3am on a Saturday and 9am on a Monday. That consistency is the actual product. Our WhatsApp AI sales agent does the quoting, the link and the chase inside the thread. Wiring one process end to end, gateway to CRM to chat, runs from AED 6,000 to set up and AED 1,200 a month as an automation build. If you want the map of where your own flow stops moving on its own before committing to anything, a Growth Audit starts at AED 3,000.
Written by Artur Gall, founder of slgo.ai. We connect payment providers to the CRM, chat and reporting systems that have to react when money arrives, and we run that setup on our own bookings first. slgo is not a bank, a gateway or a payment provider.
