At some point, most growing businesses need their website to talk to something else: an M-Pesa paybill for payments, a booking calendar for appointments, an email system for confirmations, or an accounting tool for invoicing. This is called an integration, and it is where a lot of website projects quietly go wrong, not because the technology is exotic, but because nobody asked the right questions before the work started.
You do not need to understand how an API works to protect yourself here. You need to know what to ask.
What Happens if the Connection Fails Mid-Transaction?
This is the single most important question for anything involving M-Pesa or payments. A customer pays, and somewhere between M-Pesa confirming the payment and your website recording it, something goes wrong: a timeout, a server restart, a dropped connection. Ask your developer directly what happens in that scenario. Does the customer get charged with no record on your end? Is there a reconciliation process? A properly built integration logs every transaction attempt independently of whether the rest of the flow completes, so nothing gets lost even if a step fails.
If the answer you get is vague, or if "that should not happen" is the whole answer, that is a red flag. It will happen eventually, and you want to know in advance how it is handled.
Who Is Responsible When the Third-Party Service Changes?
M-Pesa, email providers, and booking platforms all update their systems over time, sometimes with advance notice and sometimes without. When that happens, integrations can break without any change to your own website. Ask who is responsible for noticing this, and whether that monitoring is part of your maintenance arrangement or something you will be billed for separately when it happens. This is exactly the kind of ongoing responsibility covered by an actual website maintenance plan, rather than a one-time build with no aftercare.
Where Is Customer Data Actually Stored?
If your integration involves customer names, phone numbers, payment references, or booking details, ask exactly where that data lives, who can access it, and whether it is encrypted. This matters both for your customers' privacy and for your own liability if that data is ever exposed. A developer who cannot answer this clearly has probably not thought it through, which means neither has your website.
What Happens to Bookings or Payments if the Website Goes Down?
If your booking system or payment flow depends entirely on your website being online, a hosting outage means lost business with no fallback. Ask whether critical actions like payment confirmation are handled in a way that is resilient to short outages, and what a customer sees if something does go wrong mid-booking. A clear, honest error message that tells the customer to try again or contact you directly is far better than a broken page with no explanation.
Can I See This Working Before It Goes Live?
Any competent developer should be able to show you the integration working in a test environment before it touches real customer payments or bookings. If you are told this cannot be demonstrated in advance, that is worth pushing back on. Testing an M-Pesa integration with real transactions on a live site is not an acceptable way to find bugs.
Is This Something I Can Change Later Without Starting Over?
Ask how the integration is built and whether swapping providers later, for example moving from one email service to another, or adding a second payment channel, would mean rebuilding the whole thing or just reconfiguring a piece of it. Integrations built properly are modular enough that one piece can be replaced without touching everything else.
Why This Matters More Than the Website Itself
A website that looks good but mishandles a payment or loses a booking is worse than no website at all, because it actively damages trust with the customers who took the time to try to give you money or book your service. This is the part of a build where cutting corners costs the most, and it is also the part that is hardest for a non-technical business owner to evaluate just by looking at the finished product.
If you are planning an integration and want a second opinion on a quote or a proposed approach before committing, our business systems team is happy to walk through it with you. Reach out through our contact page and describe what you are trying to connect.