Today we offer our users a plethora of Payment Options on LHD. The journey in this domain with a small team was not an easy task to get around with.
Why?
Unlike western countries where you can move into your comfort zone just by integrating Credit/Debit Card module of stripe, Indian markets have grown far too complicated when it comes to collecting payments from customers.
We initially went live with our basic website in Dec, 2016 which looked really obsolete in terms of UI/UX even back then. For online payments we chose CCAvenue just because everyone else was doing so. Their checkout did introduce a bit of extra friction to our already existing UX having friction coefficient of somewhere around 0.9.
Because we believed that future belongs to mobile apps, we did not do much about existence of CCAvenue or not-so-good UI/UX of our website and moved to developing the first version of our android app. All went well until we came to integration of payment gateway. CCAvenue just wasn’t the right choice to go for our not-so-bad UI/UX of mobile app.
We somehow stopped by Razorpay and although we weren’t sure if it is a reliable choice, we just chose it because it looked really good with our app. Everything went well for about 5–6 months until we felt customers were leaving after initiating a payment just because they couldn’t find Paytm in list of wallets provided by Razorpay or because we did not have a pay later option. We were sure it was just the beginning, and it was where in November-December 2017 we began independent integration of online payment options at LHD.
How?
Pay Later options were something new and fascinating to start with. It was ePayLater that we began with. It was simply an email sent to their customer support and they were generous enough to call us the very next day. Their integration was not too difficult except for them not having any helper classes for Python. Integration did not take more than 48 hours but all the formalities, testing by their team, sharing of production credentials etc took over 2 weeks.
This was followed by LazyPay. I have previously integrated Citrus as payment gateway and integrating LazyPay was not too different and either. The only not-so-good part about their integration process was that they charges us INR 10,000 in the name of technical integration fees. Citrus Wallet came along with LazyPay in terms of integration.
Paytm and Freecharge went simultaneously and their integration process was also similar. With both these, just be careful during checksum generation stage and it will just be fine.
Being an emerging startup, PhonePe and OlaMoney were hard to crack in terms of getting into communication with them. There were a series of cold emails sent to their customer support team/business team to get them into the loop. This continued for a month or two (yes, a long period indeed) and once the integration started, it was not something out of box like Simpl which was entirely different in terms of information flow when it came to integration, although Simpl business team was very supportive.
The Road Ahead
Currently for the payment gateways we sometime work upon making the process more efficient. We are also planning to integrate Mobikwik sometime soon as Razorpay has recently removed it from their list of available wallets and we have received a couple of customer queries on our customer support channels.
In a separate post, we will describe basic integration methodology of all payment gateways that we’ve integrated so far.
— Post contributed by Aman Khantaal, Software Developer at LHD India.
