Which Payment Gateway to use in India?

Every internet startup, sooner or later, faces this question - How do I charge money from my customer online? And there comes the ultimate question of which internet payment gateway to use on your website. This is a tricky question particularly in the Indian context, as payment gateways available in India do not come cheap and can have issues with reliability as well.

We were also faced with this ultimate question for mustseeindia.com, and we did our research.

There are 2 types of players in this field, one is a 3rd party service like ccavenue, ebs etc which ties up with many banks, and other is the bank itself providing its own payment gateway (like ICICI payseal). Broadly they are different in the following ways:

• Both players accept all type of Mastercard and Visa credit cards. 3rd party players typically have more options than banks in terms of debit card acceptance, net banking options and other payments modes like cash card.
• Banks are for high volume players. They have lower TDR (the % money they keep per transaction) plans and relatively lower setup fees than 3rd party providers, but if you have low volumes, they would turn out to be expensive.
• 3rd party players have plans as cheap as Rs 5,000 setup fee, but the TDRs can go as high as 7%. They would never go below a TDR of 2.5% approx, which means that at higher volumes, you would need to switch to a bank to get a TDR below 2.5%
• Banks need lots and lots of paperwork, and integration time is usually more than 2 weeks. 3rd party players typically have lesser requirements.

Here is my individual assessment of the players I contacted:

• Paypal : I am starting with this as most people suggest it on internet. Biggest issue with paypal is that it doesn't support transactions in Indian Currency, and hence it adds a currency conversion fee on the credit card. Also, I feel that asking an indian consumer to pay in dollars would turn him away just because of the psychological impact.
• CCAvenue : The biggest 3rd party player in India. Offers variety of payment options which no other player come even close. Heard that it is quite reliable too. They are also the most expensive in the industry. They don't offer any custom plan other than the ones mentioned on their site, and they don't negotiate either (atleast with small players)
• EBS : Probably the second best player after ccavenue. The plans are cheaper compared to most payment gateways. They were very responsive when I dropped my phone no on their site and offered me multiple custom plans as well as some discounts. Somehow I didn't find too many existing clients for this.
• ICICI Payseal : They are probably the only bank who offer to small enterprises as well. If you are willing to spend in excess of Rs 25,000 in setup fees than you would get a better deal here than any 3rd party player. However, 2 issues to note specific to them: Technology reqt of java in integrating their gateway and issues with downtime. I personally noticed their gateway being down for several hours on irctc as well as pvrcinemas recently.
• Times of Money Direcpay : A relatively newer player in the market. One of its clients told me that they still face a few technical issues here and there. They responded pretty late when I dropped my contact no on their site and offered prices similar or higher than EBS.
• We tried contacting to Citibank(Billdesk) but they didn't respond. We didn't talk to HDFC at all as we didn't get good reviews for them.

The final two we shortlist out of these for us were EBS and ICICI. Of these, we decided to go to EBS, because:

• ICICI Payseal had technology dependency on Java. When discussed, they offered another gateway with no such limitation called Nix. But I couldn't find any documentation on that.
• I believe that EBS should be more reliable than ICICI in terms of higher speed and lower downtime.
• EBS offers more payment options than ICICI, though the difference is not that great for this to be the sole reason.
• With EBS, even the plans with low setup costs like their silver plan has reasonable TDR for a small business. Once our volumes are high, we can upgrade to a better plan.

Wedding, Honeymoon ... and back to Business

The long vacation is over. It actually got over some 12 days ago, but getting back to the business keeps you busy enough to stay away from blog.


Ankita is now an integral part of Goel Family. And I thank everyone who was there to witness it. You can find few selected pics of our wedding here.

Keeping in line with the message of mustseeindia.com, We went to Kashmir for our honeymoon. I would find some time later on to write a full post on how great a place it was and how much fun we had. For now, I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Gulmarg

The remaining photos are here.

With all these sweet memories, now I am back to Bangalore. And as Ankita joins me here tomorrow, we look forward to starting a new life together. Thank you all who have always been there for us. Let the good times keep on rolling.

D-Day Tomorrow

Its almost time. Tomorrow is when me and Ankita would exchange vows to spend our rest of the lives together. And tomorrow is also the day when some 270 km away, my dear friend Vikas exchanges vows with Vinita to start their new life together.

Setting an example in extreme startup efficienby, the mustseeindia.com team has doubled its team within a span of 31 days ;-)

Here's the new team (with 2 potential hires ;-))


Wish both the couples luck as we start a new life tomorrow.

Two great startup articles

Vikas Rana, Founder and CEO mustseeindia.com, has written a great article about our experiences at running a startup, focussing on what we did right. Do check it out here.

Prateek Dayal, Founder muziboo.com, writes about costs involved in a startup.

Both are great articles if you are a budding entrepreneur. Recommended read.

Busy busy ... and MSI's new look

There has been times before when I couldn't blog for more than a month. However, I doubt there has been a more busier period in my almost 7 years of professional life.

It has been partly because of the 3 weeks vacation I took to get Engaged and to go on my last bachelor trip, a trip to the North East. I would hopefully get some time next month to write about my experiences there.

The other important reason which has kept all of us here at Must See India busy is the new look of mustseeindia.com. Our earlier theme had been around for some 8 months and we thought it was about time to get something new. We now have an orange theme throughout the site, which looks pretty pleasing to my eye. Also, the pages are much better organized now with one click access to all our new features - flight, train, bus and hotel search.

Please do comment with your valuable feedback for the same.

That is all the time I can spend on this blog right now. You can catch me on twitter for more frequent updates. And tomorrow is an important day in my fiancee's life, so I better get prepared for that ;-)

Losing Status

This is that part of the life which everyone knows is coming and no one knows why. Well I did have some sadistic reasons to people who asked me why in the past, but now I would need permission to publish them. So much for freedom of speech :D

I have lost my bachelor status, as I am now officially engaged to Ankita.

Engagement Pics

Bobby, PK, Lapy, Mama, Lalka, Sid A, Karan, Gaurav, Aman and Priyanka - thanks for coming. You are the best. Hope you all and everyone else would be there for the moral support on D-Day.

25 Random Things about me

I recently wrote a list of 25 things about me on facebook. Reproducing the same here:

• I would be surprised if I am able to write 25 things about myself.
  
• My college nickname Shakti went on to become my alter ego.
  
• I am not a geek in the true sense. I am an entrepreneurial geek. And I know less than most people think I know.
  
• I have reverse aged. Most things that people do in college, I did after it. And I still feel around 5 years older than I actually am.
  
• I am one of the earliest adopters of most web 2.0 services you see today. Gmail, Orkut, delicious, flickr etc
  
• I started blogging in 2004 out of boredom at work. It is one of the best things I have done and continuing.
  
• I discovered my fascination for amateur photography during my Kashmir trip.
  
• I started my first entrepreneur venture mustseeindia.com last year.
  
• I am a risk taker in general and I love adventure sports. I have done rafting, skiing, paragliding. I wish to do sky diving.
  
• I am one hell of a procrastinator.
  
• I am a good teacher. I wish to teach a class just for fun.
  
• I love snow and the Himalayas.
  
• My first kiss was on my bday. My first breakup was on my bday too.
  
• I changed so much during college that a college senior who saw me after 2 years couldn't recognize me.
  
• Quite a few of my friends take my advice in their personal matters.
  
• Biggest compliment I ever got was - It would be really difficult to find a guy who would say bad things about Sanjay.
  
• My only ever purchase of Internet services (except for web hosting for my company) is buying storage on Picasa for storing photos.
  
• Given enough time, I am a good judge of people. I used to do MBTI personality test on willing friends.
  
• I used to have serious aversion to girls till end of college. Now, few of my best friends are girls.
  
• I love gadgets. I used to be a mobile phone freak too until I bought the iPhone. I have become totally uninterested in other phones ever since.
  
• I love music (even though that seems like a cliche). I own a pair of bose headphones for the same.
  
• I am a bad bad singer but I really like to sing. That made me the most popular cacophonist during college.
  
• I have been decent in sports. My biggest achievement in sports is winning a silver medal for my hostel in Volleyball.
  
• I was the surprise Carrom Champion in my final year at college. It was incidently my debut at the championship. I also loved the Munnabhai MBBS carrom sequence, the only place ever where carrom has been glorified.
  
• I have surprised myself. Wrote 25 items and still can think of a few more to write.