Introducing Quick Bills — A URL that gets you paid

This is a series of posts introducing Quick Bill — a new tool that helps merchants and freelancers accept payments internationally

At Safepay, we’ve been extremely interested in trying to solve how we can make digital payments easier for Pakistan. Every now and then startups and entrepreneurs would have similar complaints about transacting internationally.

Whether you’re a merchant with an e-commerce store selling goods and services, or a freelancer with clients all over the world, collecting and managing payments shouldn’t have to be this hard. But despite it being hard, it’s not impossible and us being Pakistanis, know the secret — jugaad.

We’ve heard people accepting payments using their cousin’s PayPal accounts and transferring the money through TransferWise to their Pakistani bank accounts. And when PayPal blocks them, they open up a Stripe account under a US based LLC that transfers money back to a Skrill account which is then used to transfer the balance out to a Pakistani bank account.

Point being, people do what they have to do. It’s part of the hustle.

And then there are some businesses that turn to options like 2Checkout to process their payments for them, incurring hefty fees and unfair foreign exchange rates to avoid the hassle of jumping through circus hoops.

Even locally, transacting online has never been a smooth process. We do have options to pay for the things we buy online digitally but cash on delivery is still king. Up to 90% of online transactions are still settled via cash on delivery. And yes, I understand the appeal of the idea — customers get the satisfaction and convenience of paying after they’ve received the product. Ensuring their peace of mind that they’re not being robbed of their money by merchants they don’t trust yet. A completely fair point. COD also helps underbanked and unbanked households shop for things online.

But:

• What if someone wants to buy a gift and have it shipped to their friend’s address?
• What if a freelancer wants to charge an international client for work he has done?
• What if a merchant wants to accept partial payment up front before they ship the item out?
• What if merchants cant wait 7–10 days for their COD provider to settle their balance?
• What if a hosting company wants to charge clients for providing cloud hosting and internet services?
• What if people aren’t comfortable carrying around large sums of cash with them?

These, and many more problems came to mind when we spoke to our early users about how they were currently transacting online.

So we asked ourselves the obvious question, could there be a better way to exchange value online? We think so.

And we wrote about the solution we came up with. Read about it by clicking here: https://medium.com/safepay/introducing-quick-bills-a-secure-and-flexible-payments-option-f89e4f75be5