[We have covered Payment Gateways earlier (read this comparison of different payment gateway solutions in India). Here is a guest article by Sanjay Goel, founder of MustseeIndia. Sanjay shares his assessment of different options available.]
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.
It would be interesting to hear opinions on online fraud and risk management tools offered by the above mentioned payment gateways from Indian startups that charge customers online for transactions.
Personally, I find the online fraud tracking, rules engines (that can be customized by merchants) and risk management support offered by most Indian gateways pretty sad.
While global payment giants like PayPal invest a ton in cutting edge fraud technologies and provide seller (merchant) protection (inclusive in their transaction fees) I do not see them being useful for the Indian market for low $ value transactions due to price per transaction + currency exchange fees.
I would imagine online fraud is a problem and a loss/expense to startups given that stolen credit card fraud is a blooming global trend. So net net 2 questions for the pluggd community:
1. What are current online business doing to manage online fraud and manage chargebacks?
2. What useful fraud tools are the Indian payment engines offering currently? Plan to offer in near future?
And none of them have recurring payment tool, to allow SAAS services charge for usage of their platform. I really think that current options in payment gateways are a major impediment on the growth on internet in India… I have found even paying phone bills of major companies like Airtel through these gateways quite unreliable. Is anyone working on this side of things???
-cheers,
Arvind
http://yousuggest.us
We also have to look how many of them are PCI DSS compliant. I see only ccavenue and timesofmoney. Timesofmoney recently got PCI DSS certified but pity they don’t leverage it, I don’t see it on their website.
Mere saying that they meet PCI standards doesn’t suffice, like EBS.
Fraud detection and security is critical for a PG. Similar to how they ask their customers for security deposits, customers can ask for proof of fraud detection, risk management tools, etc.
The PCI council has set deadlines and hefty fines for merchants, PG and card issuers for not complying.
I fully agree that merely by saying that a company meets PCI standards doesn’t suffice. The credentials definately has to be proved which can be confirmed from the website whether PCI compliance logo has been verified. We are also of the same opinion that Fraud detection and security is critical for a payment gateway provider. That is the very reason we are having our Risk Management System and a dedicated Risk Monitoring Team to filter the transaction in real time. This enables our merchant to experience a secure e-commerce experience.
Mr. Niranjan I request you to re-confirm the details at your end before arriving at any conclusion. It will be our privilege to resolve your further queries.
Vidhi Bhatt
Manager-eCommerce
E-Billing Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Dear Vidhi,
I value your positive reaction and eagerness to clarify on the matter. Please note that I did not endorse or derogate any vendor here and had merely mentioned my comments based on prima facie information I obtained from these PG websites.
To clear up on my statement; when I visited your website I noticed only the ‘PCI Compliant by Clearcase’ image rolling on the right sidebar and not the PCI compliant seal at the bottom as either it was not on the page I was visiting or blocked inadvertently by my browser.
On the contrary, I appreciate and congratulate as you choose for PCI compliance even though you are a Level 1 vendor.
I also presume your customer support staff share the same zeal and positive attitude towards customer’s issues.
My personal experience with CCAVenue was really bad. I do think they are the leaders in this space in India and they must know that too. The Customer Service people out there are dumb and the Execs are …. pardon my French, pricks !!!
Times of Money, still needs to have a LOT of experience. They are decent, but I could have done with more options and a better interface.
This is so stupid. I have been using CCAvenue for six years now and they are the most professional company I have ever encountered. Are you just a troll out to defame them. Can you give your website URL and contact numbers and give in detail as to the details of your so called bad experience?
u guys r fools. ccave sucks man…why give them so much credit. they r taking my money away…all payment gateway suck – suck – suck..
@ Vidhi do you guys have a recurring payment tool. If yes, please let me know.
Dear Arvind,
As of now EBS is not having recurring payment tool but we have other features for merchants that will definitely benefit them for their e-commerce website such as shopping cart, Risk Analysis System, Hotel Reservation Software.Shortly we will enable this option as well.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
Vidhi Bhatt
Manager-eCommerce
E-Billing Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Vidhi can u connect with me at arvind [at] latticepurple [dot] com
As far as I know PAYPAL is illegal to use in India.
For all sales in India, customers must pay in INR. For all export sales it is very important to obtain FIRC / BRC certificate from your Bank according RBI/FERA laws.
All paypouts from PAYPAL is in INR & no bank will issue FIRC / BRC.
If you read ebay.in website communities, there are lot of users who have discussed it there, and its ironical that PAYPAL being a EBAY company they are unable to clarify. Also Ebay in India has PAISAPAY & dont use PAYPAL.
I know few Gems & Jewellery dealers in Jaipur who have got into trouble by accepting payments through PAYPAL.
Very detailed and good article.I am not sure if PayPal is legal or not but it brings in some level of confidence to the users about the website.
no mention of bill desk..it is gaining popularity quite rapidly!!
r u from billdesk itself @rahul
Bill desk is now No#1 in India , used by All top companies in India to accept online payment.
India needs a plug and play payment gateway service. To be honest, there are way too much hassle to acquire a decent gateway, right from getting docs franked to company seals etc.
As for the above mentioned PGs, all of them are good in some way or the other. I have dealt with EBS (Vidhi) and even CCAvenues and both are professionals when it comes to customer service. It is just that the RBI has certain ‘DUMB’ laws which has kept the PG market a bit closed, add to it the pain to sign banks as partners.
I would like to go for an online PG for my website..
Can anybody pls give me an idea in choosing a payment gateway with good Interface..
With Regards
Darshini
- Arvind, could not agree with you more. Payment Gateways are a big hurdle for e-commerce in India. No product or service is doing more than ultra basic money movement.
- The current PayPal offering is in USD because it has been set up to cater to the cross border business on eBay that is seller in India and buyer worldwide. The current online volumes in India would not make sense for PayPal to create a custom payment solution for INR. For various markets PayPal has launched local websites that offer payments in local currency! Try India and see products http://bit.ly/4xvRZ
- Please do not use the same old government RBI policy excuse for payment gateways not investing in product development. For example, RBI rules have nothing to do with timeout errors. Also >50% of online card transactions with any payment gateway in India fail the first time and require the user to re-try the flow – nothing to do with govt rules here.
- EBS may seem like one of the amazing players in the current landscape but I strongly disagree with Vidhi about EBS’s Risk Management capabilities. I have personally used their system with 2 companies I am consulting with – they dont even block or pend a payment made by a fraudster
with a stolen credit card on the 5th attempt after the same fraudster from the same IP with same card has failed 4 attempts within the last 15 minutes. This is hardly fraud management! How about actually saving your merchant customers chargebacks?? Anyone who wants to challenge my EBS claim may please email me, I will be happy to email you proof.
Dear Upasana,
As per your claims please email me at vidhi@ebs.in ,those company’s name and site so we also can review the same. As we are confident on our systems, it would be our privilege to clarify your doubts on this. As we do trust our risk management which is being used by all our merchants, none of them have faced any such instances. For better understanding, our risk team would be pleased to give you the measures we adopt in processing transactions and the success ratio for preventing frauds. As we understand a blog is an independent platform for expressing opinions and experiences, we truly respect all the comments. We will be glad to clarify all the apprehensions.
Best Regards,
Vidhi Bhatt
Manager-eCommerce
what’s going on here – cat fight. anyway, what was the outcome ladies?
Good article. We’ve used EBS so far and are pretty happy with them. We went with EBS as their response time was fabulous, we often forget service standards while making a decision in this country.
Also, PG companies are killing online businesses with such high % fee!
well if a company is responding directly in an open forum, it definitely has something positive about itself… I appreciate openness.
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I found this 5% OFF Coupon for CCAvenue.Might be useful for someone planning to go for CCAvenue:
http://www.offersforshoppers.com/NewOFS/leads/payment-gateway/payment-gateway-india.htm
Very informative article.
Thanks for posting it.
I have been a user of Ccavenues for an USD payment from 2004 and it has been great. Recently I shifted to Paypal for the reason Ccavenues was unable to process Master card. Paypal has been a nightmare experience. They have a bad customer service, you need to call them, they do not communicate through emails. And worst of all they have their own currency converter which is always 1 Rupee to 1.50 Rupee lesser than the current market rate.
well all techi people said thier views , and the fact is that why if paypal is not elligble by the indian goverment why its being mostly popular among indians .
exportrs are having lots of trouble with the paypal and even though paypal or Indian government not providing any resulation for the same .
and regarding concern with the 3rd party concern i myslef seen may sites whether its makymytrip or inox or irtc or you name any one will have mostly either the page faliur issue or something else in connection .
and the US user is like freak about the PAYPAL they don't understand anything apart from PAYPAL or anything else.
So overall my saying is we ourslef promote the wrong system and we only raise the question about it .
So is there any easy and safe solution for the Payments with zero downtime In india .
Thanks
Regards
nice discussion has added lot of value to orginal article however i see all payment gateway in india are a joke…non allows you to get paid by buyers with them leaving/redirect to bank site
Hello,
I would not say that all payment gateways in India are a big joke. There is a big scope of improvement, and TDR rates are too high, but things are bound to improve as more players enter the market. There are precautions that one can take, and prepare before signing up with a payment gateway (to avoid future surprises). I have prepared a checklist which may be useful to someone looking to setup a new payment gateway account. Here is the link
http://www.friendsofbooks.com/blog/top-ten-questions-for-payment-gateways
Thank you,
Manish Kumar
Hi,
We are using both Paypal & CCAvenue on our site from last 3 years.
Last year we had switched to privilage scheme of ccavenue, it is really good option to accept payments with multiple cards and banks options.
But now we are facing much problem with ccavenue, transaction failure rate is continuously increasing on it, in ratio 5 transactions execute successfully out of 10.
And if same customer opt for paypal everything goes fine. We have reported same thing several time to CCAvenue and received similar reply every time, “this authorization process is not in our hand and we depends on bank’s response, ccavenue does not comes in role. so please ask customer to contact bank”
I understand a bit this technical jargon, but question is when bank is declining a transaction from same card on ccavenue then how it works fine when customer pay using paypal?
CCAvenue have also checked my site to see if there is any technical issue in integration but everything seems to be work fine.
Now I am clueless what is the issue, in august month itself we have 30+ transaction failure mails from CCAvenue, out of that only 25% customers opt for other offline payment method or paypal so in short we are loosing business and trust. we are seriously looking to switch payment gateway to 2CO as our major clientele is from outside india.
Is there any one who also facing this transaction failure problem? any sound reason and solution for this?
One thing I have noticed, each card have it’s own verificaton system like VBV of visa, MSC of master card and AMAX use AVS system for verification and if a customer enters wrong address it decline the transactions.
But as a end consumer (card holder) I don;t aware of these hidden verificaton system (although VBV & MSC prompt for code so most of the users know it), and on ccavenue payment page there is no hint about such things, some time users enter different address other then AMAX records. So there should be some help or info on payment page, some basic reason that may cause transaction failures, this small usability change may increase success rate of transactions.
If any one have suggestion please help me. Thanks
-
Vineet
Atom Technologies limited is also into the Payment Gateway & Net Banking solution.
You should check out.
Hi Vineet ,
Just try Indiapay Payment Gateway service for your portal
We are planning to intergrate payment gate way through our site cocohouseboatskerala dot com , got an offer from EBS.
Please uggest me about their feedback
Switen
Hi Switen,
EBS is good. I would suggest you also get a quote from CCAvenue, and then decide on one based on rates you get.
Manish
I have a simple query from u all PG users…………….
Is it possible to omit all Indian Banks(Like SBI, Axis etc) names from the drop down list of bank names in debit card option.I want to show only the foreign bank names on the gateway page.
Please suggest.
this thread has long stories, right from years. My straight Question is, whats is the cheapest and easiest way for small scale web developers,?
pls help me in my confusion, thanks in advance
Sandeep,
If its very small scale project (one person), try PayPal. Otherwise go for EBS for ccAvenue.
Manish
paypal dont accept indian banks, esp debit cards na…
Hi Sandeep,
You can checkout with whizPay one of the Global players operating in INDIA. They are far far better when it comes to service and pricing as compared to any of the service providers in INDIA. For more info refer their website. http://www.whizpay.net.
That is true…if net banking is a requirement, then EBS and ccAvenue are the best options to consider, in my opinion.
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Don’t get me wrong – but the writer of the article have very little understanding of online payment industry.
Although the problem is evident but understanding of who is who and who does what in the industry is so little that having a conversation on the problem is worthless.
As per the current market, i think there is one more solution and that is indiapay but they claim not to be third party. So may not be compared with ccavenue. Ebs has good rates.
Somebody here suggested whizpay and atom… not much info given on their website about the fees and the works. Atom does seem to have a ‘lite’ version for handicapped it businessmen to mean no tech inclination but no pricing.
Regards,
I am using EBS and am very satisfied with their service and charges. Their customer support is good. One can check their payment gateway in action at http://www.indian-share-tips.com/
Regards
I have also come to know about one more payment realisation gateway. This does not work on the online platform but allows customers to pay at a brick and mortar establishment. the name is ipaynear.
I have dropped them a mail but its been in queue for more than 2 days..
Even AlertPay has operations in Navi Mumbai, they accept payment in INR but payout is in dollers. That could be a stumbling block.
As one of the contributors here already added, payment gateways feels hesitation to provide services to Domain and Web Hosting companies. Same for CCAvenue, Transecute (it was not open for new subscribers but since the past couple of months it has started to accept new applications may be because Directi branched out to CCAvenue), IndiaPay as well as WhizPay. But ofcourse CCAvenue very gracieously accepts applics for Net Banking. Yet to get details from DirecPay and EBS.
These Pg’s harp about the chargebacks and all, but to date (2 yrs) i am yet to get a single case where the customer has asked for or accused of wrong charges. What more i am about to expand my hosting portfolio.
I may add as – Transecute does not provide Netbanking but otherwise has a flat fee structure and no hidden or otherwise AMC fees.
Never go for EBS,
The worst service i ever had.They just disable card solution just for technical maintenance.The EBS person send us mail that it will be done in 5-7 days maximum and even after 14 days there is NO result.
Very bad customer service.
Hi Ashish – As per our discussions, thanks for uderstanding the maintenence isssue faced by us from the bank which was beyond our control as this industry is purely regulated by banks & card associations. As this sudden change from banks side also affected our brand & business like yours, we did our best to see your account is activated at the earliest.Hope your account is activated and would be happy to see good business coming in. Looking for long term business assocition & thanks for all your support
Priti Shah
President – Ecommerce
Searching for payment Gateway Solution. Contact me at sobhanb at gmail dot com
This is India..Incredible.
ipaynear as i had said in the previous post is yet to get back to me. Whizpay is not anything dif from CCavenue/ EBS.
May just decide a toss between CCAvenue and DirecPay.
Any payment gateway provider can let me know the criteria to get the payment gateway services. Already rejected twice.Reason they say real estate is not permissible domain. Is having office is also compulsory? What are other criteria?
Regards
Sanjay
RealEstateDealStreet.com
I am Meenu Garg from Fresh Buy Inida, using EBS Payment Gateway on http://www.freshbuy.in just close a couple of month back with E-Billing Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Mr. Sunil Kapoor is the person from EBS gave me very good service, he close my account with in two day and my payment gateway was live in 40-45 days. My personal experience with EBS is very good and personally recommended Mr. Sunil Kapoor (9560215757/9212609079) For payment Gateway . I am very satisfied with their service.
Meenu Garg
Fresh Buy India
If you have used this as tool to promot your site then it is different thing.
Now I tell you about my experience about Mr. Sunil Kapoor. I called him and asked about whether can I get payment gateway services even if I m operating from home. He said yes I can get and started persuading me, then after couple of day’s I said to him that his company’s india sales head Priti Shah only told me that I can’t get without office.After hearing this he said to me that he got another call and call me back and one week have passed and he has not called me as yet. If you think you got the payment gateway because of him or EBS then you are wrong, you got it because your business model will be less risky or you might be having better financial net worth.Afterr dealing with EBS and Ms. Priti Shah and Sunil Kapoor I can say that they are not only incompetent but unethical also.
Interested in getting Payment gateway. Please let me know the procedure in details with charges.
MK Sukumaran
Symphony Travels
Any one can give me feedback of atom technologies limited …..I have been approached and planning to finalize with them.
If you have used this as tool to promot your site then it is different thing.
Now I tell you about my experience about Mr. Sunil Kapoor. I called him and asked about whether can I get payment gateway services even if I m operating from home. He said yes I can get and started persuading me, then after couple of day’s I said to him that his company’s President and India sales head Priti Shah only told me that I can’t get without office.After hearing this he said to me that he got another call and call me back and one week have passed and he has not called me as yet. If you think you got the payment gateway because of him or EBS then you are wrong, you got it because your business model will be less risky or you might be having better financial net worth.Afterr dealing with EBS and Ms. Priti Shah and Sunil Kapoor I can say that they are not only incompetent but unethical also.
@ Mr Sanjay – I would like to highlight certain facts which are defaming our hard earned reputation and brand equity established in the Indian domain by itself and not by self blogging tools, to promote EBS.
Every individual has a right to express opinion and we respect our customers & their opinions but I would appreciate the words used are judiciously by both parties as the same should been commented in an open forum by taking into account all related factors for an incident.
I would have only conveyed to you what would have been disapproved by our banking partners at that time. We would appreciate if you note that we are also of the opinion that business from home & different models should be approved. You can comprehend that we would be equally concerned about loosing business & growth of this industry. However final approval is only to the bank discretion and associated cases of fraud in this area have played a major role to influence their decision.
Owing to change in bank policies for all pending applications we have to convey clients for our inablity to process their application at that point. Hopefully it should be a fact that if a certain case isn’t approved, it cannot be used to address us as incompetent & unethical.
You can contact me at priti@ebs.in I would gladly provide any clarifications required in this context as we are already working hard with banks to provide a suitable solution for this constraint.
Regards,
Priti Shah
President – EBS