There’s an elephant in the room and no one wants to talk about it, so here I am. You guessed right, Payment Gateways.
@rohan_kini from the fantastically cool Bums On The Saddle Bicycle Store (especially for Trek & Firefox bikes) in Bangalore had paid us a visit not too long ago. They’ve been getting requests from all over India for Bikes and Accessories and was wondering if they should notch it up a bit.
Then — on bended knee — he popped the question: “What do you think about the payment gateways?”
He got a couple of pieces of my mind, but Anshul in Barriers To e-Commerce In India has already got most of this down, so I won’t repeat myself or himself.
Flipkart has been online for a couple of years. Things have been great so far — and I’m not going to complain for the sake of complaining — but, the more things change the more they stay the same. And that just won’t cut it.
For the record, we use ccAvenue and EBS. As I had earlier mentioned, they are safe, no doubt. If you’ve bought a book from us, chances are you used either one of these.
And if you couldn’t buy a book from us, chances are you used one of these.
This right here is my gripe.
They do their job, and they do it well — we’ve become what we have and no small credit to the PGs. The roadblock is when it comes to scaling up, which is when things fall apart.
It isn’t just the code base or the integration mechanism or the documentation. It’s in small parts the multi-stage interaction, node hops and packet drops, data speeds and bandwidth, banks and much more.
I’m oversimplifying the issue here, for more reasons than one — mostly because the causes are more than one. And none of the above means anything for the end user. An API is just an acronym for him when all he wants to know is “Have you got my money or not?” and better still “You stole my money and I’m off to consumer court!”.
I empathize completely.
Where it hurts us as a merchant is here:
EBS
Alexa EBS Clickstream
ccAvenue
Alexa ccAvenue Clickstream
We send across not a small number of users to both gateways.
Plenty of users complain when Companies and Services do not fulfill their end of the bargain. I know a lot of you do when Flipkart does a boo-boo. But how come not many businesses do, when payment gateways aren’t up to par? If the answer to that is “because we are wholly dependent on them.”, then I’m afraid sooner or later, e-commerce companies will start building their own gateways.
Where are all the e-commerce merchants? And how about all you users who equally bear the brunt of it?
8 Comments
Any chance of having COD implemented sometime soon?
That’s the only reason preventing many people in my college from ordering from Flipkart..
Regarding this specific gripe:
“And if you couldn’t buy a book from us, chances are you used one of these.” - how bad is the % of incomplete aka dropped transactions and % of failed transactions? I am thinking no analytics or insights are offered by any of the PGs on these either.
My top 3 pain points for Indian payment gateways or merchant service providers are:
1. unexplained lost business on payment gateway’s pages (dropped + declined transaction)
2. poor product leading to poor user experience (simple page redirect used in India, no API based self-hosted payment pages)
3. limited backend features (for automated reconciliation, settlement, chargebacks, refunds)
What are yours? Leave a note or email me.
I see you’re using TechPro now. Did you ditch EBS and CCAve? How about an update to this post?
Thanks!
We use CC and i find them pretty unprofessional. They have set templates and they’ll never offer us any options to customize.
The call center is the most upsetting bit. They can answer some queries at times without even doing a complete verification of the caller.
if you’re looking to incorporate online payment gateway for the first time, indiapay provide the solution.
need an update post for this.. have u guys built your own payment gateway now…
Excellent site you have here!
I’ve done some checking and it seems PayPal does not handle users in India. Is this information accurate? This would explain why there is a local online payment system for flipkart.