What is Instamojo.com?
Someone on Quora asked me — What is Instamojo? I took the liberty to answer Instamojo’s past, present & future plans.
~Reproducing it below~
Briefly, Instamojo.com is a digital payments platform bundled with tons of e-commerce features to enable any business or individual to sell, manage & grow online securely, effortlessly and cost-effectively.
Our platform is built upon existing financial infrastructure of bank accounts, credit cards or other digital payment instruments to create a pervasive & persistent real-time payment solution. We deliver a product ideally suited for Indian SMB’s, online merchants, individuals and others currently underserved by traditional payment mechanisms.
We have positioned ourselves as the “simplest payment solution” where we have removed barriers of entry like technical know-how, upfront costs, providing access to distribution channels on web & mobile through various up-selling & cross-selling e-commerce tools & features; thus boosting time to market for small businesses to sell & collect payments, manage & grow rapidly.
Also, my colleague Aditya Sengupta wrote an answer which might shed some light on our business philosophy.
========
Now to elaborate, let me take you through past, present & future ambitions of Instamojo. Hoping that would give you a fair idea of what is Instamojo.com.
PAST (2013–2014):
Instamojo.com used as a platform to sell digital products like eBooks, music, software etc as downloads, directly to your audience by sharing a link.
Upon clicking the link, it would lead to a landing page (optimized across mobile, web & tablet) which carried information of the product like price, description, file size, file type, images and other relevant info. Here’s an example — http://imojo.in/example. So sellers/merchants would create such links and upon sharing, buyers/consumers can make an instant purchase.
From our end, we would host the digital files, process the payments through credit cards, debit cards, net-banking facilities and then we securely deliver the digital goods once payment is successful. Hence enabling individuals, freelancers, home-prenuers, SOHO businesses to sell & collect payments for digital goods, directly from customers by sharing a payment link.
Here’s a screenshot of the homepage then (link source):
PRESENT (2015):
Present day, we do what is mentioned above, plus much more. The “much more” happened as we got wiser & smarter about our offerings and understood our users better. Also, we have grown significantly thus helping us to take advantage of data & insights to make better & smarter decisions which we couldn’t have earlier.
So what we do today is:
1. Payment Processing (payment remains our core & will be in the future also) — At Instamojo.com, we now help processes payments for businesses of all sizes apart from individuals, freelancers, SOHO & alike. But we innovated, localized & customized a lot which differentiates ourselves from other payment gateways.
First up, with Instamojo you don’t require to set-up a merchant account with a ready-made website to process online card payments at all, which is the prevalent norm in India. You can start immediately by uploading your PAN no. and bank statement on the platform (and we are still working to make it much better than just uploading). That means no physical paperwork, no mandatory API/technical integrations, no ad-hoc requirements, no mandatory requirement of website, physical address etc — most importantly, you don’t have to wait for weeks or may be months to get started. Now with Instamojo.com in the backend powering payments, transactions and sales — you can get started in minutes.
2. Honest & transparent pricing — We reduced our pricing to 1.9% + ST for every successful sale (also, we charge 5% + ST for digital downloads where we host the file(s), process payments & securely deliver like we used to earlier). That means in minutes you can get started to process credit cards, debit cards, net-banking modes and EMI too at just 1.9% fees without worrying about setup costs, AMC fees, developer costs, wait-period for approvals etc. We are also adding more payment options with International payments too (do reach out to support@instamojo.com as we are adding more payment options every other day).
3. Get your own online webstore for FREE- With Instamojo.com, you get your own branded “online store” without any extra costs. Imagine, an online store comes for free to every Instamojo user by default which you can market instantly and sell your stuff. If you wish, you can set it up in minutes by adding your catalog OR simply use the “payment link” to sell and collect payments for just one-off product or offering. That means, instamojo.com/{{username}} can become your ready-to-host and ready-to-market online webstore without any investment from your side. Example — instamojo.com/quench.
Below screenshot is a demo webstore page:
4. Collect Payments for Anything — Beyond digital goods, we have added functionalities to sell & collect payments for event tickets, services, membership, physical goods, subscription. Basically, anything under the sun that can be sold legitimately on internet is now possible via Instamojo in 1-click.
5. Instamojo Appstore — We give you Value Added Services right from within platform that will help sell faster, manage your business efficiently and grow rapidly on web and mobile without any worry and hassle.
6. Dispute Resolution Center — We believe your job is to create & sell and our job is to protect you from fraud, scams and malicious activities. Our sophisticated risk management system (RMS) is continuously powered by automated algorithms based on various heuristics & human oversight to silently protect you and buyers 24x7. Our dispute resolution center sits right in the center to do just that.
7. 100% Buyer and 100% Seller Protection — Needless to say, we provide 100% protection to buyers & sellers both who use Instamojo to pay and get paid. That’s our commitment and honour code.
8. Instamojo dashboard — This is where every transaction and sale consummates. Hence, we try to give you clarity on the bigger picture of why, how and when a sale clocked through analytics, sales & customer activity, quick customer communication via email, quick 1-click refund and more to keep you upto date with your business in 1-window.
9. Diverse customer segment — We now power 50,000+ MSMEs which includes individuals, freelancers, home-prenuers, SOHO and mid-large customers like UrbanClap, Shopo, RentoMojo, TripVillas, MyGola, Milaap, Neemrana Hotels, OnlinePrasad and 100’s more. They find the mere simplicity of Instamojo extremely addictive to keep using and keeping trust & faith in us.
10. Power-packed integration kit — As we evolved, so are our customers. Hence, apart from selling & collecting payments via a payment links OR online webstore OR merely Requesting a Payment (RAP), we also provide extremely simple set of APIs to integrate in your mobile app & website. Also, we have added lot of integration modules to make a developer’s life easier. Here — https://www.instamojo.com/developers/. We are adding more modules in coming months.
Here’s screenshot of the homepage today:
FUTURE (2016 onwards):
From 2016 onwards, expect more features, faster processing & payouts and much simpler experience of Instamojo.com — while keeping all the features and options intact.
Some of the ideas for 2016 and onwards are:
- We will be spending a lot of time thinking and experimenting with ideas around how to drive business for our sellers & merchants. We have done some bit of it and the preliminary results are very encouraging.
- We think like sellers & merchants, consumers/buyers are extremely critical to Instamojo’s success. As we have seen more than millions of consumers/buyers interacting with Instamojo giving us a very good headstart already on that thought process. So we will think more on how to add value to buyers & consumers too — thus creating an unified experience to both sellers and buyers on Instamojo platform.
- Expect more of work to go behind making Instamojo Appstore into a truly world class ecosystem which benefits our users.
- We will be extending lot of support to sellers in terms of financing, logistics, delivery, accounting etc to make their life far more simpler & productive. Basically, we will be extending our “Growth Partners” into something more meaningful.
- We will be extending our core support to buyer community also — both from support infrastructure & trust fabric point of view — so that, one can use Instamojo to pay any unknown/untrusted party without worrying about liability at all.
- Finally, we have big plans to truly create Instamojo into a platform where sellers, buyers and developers can participate to derive value in equal parts. Much of that foundational work has been laid. Expect to see more action on that front.
Hope this clarifies what Instamojo is. If not, do drop me a line at sampad@instamojo.com. I’ll be happy to answer question(s) that you might have.
Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders of Instamojo.com.
