The cash on delivery segment is likely to shrink from 60 per cent to 40 per cent despite the growing market, which is a sign of increasing customer confidence on the online payment process, states Vivek Sagar, MD, Emvantage Payments. In an elaborate and extensive interaction with IMAGES Retail, he reveals how choosing a payment gateway is a daunting task for e-tailers and what kind of value addition Emvantage brings in the online payment gateway sphere.
Q. How is Emvantage changing the payment landscape in India? Please tell us in brief about it.
Indian online retail is projected to grow from US$ 2 billion in 2013 to US$ 8 billion in 2016, while online shoppers will increase from 2 million to 4 million by 2016, as per Accel partner report. This projection is backed by the confidence Indian and overseas investors have shown through their investment in various e-commerce companies in India. Almost 50 per cent of online shoppers prefer the cash on delivery (CoD) payment method, which demonstrates lower confidence on the buy process as well as on the products and payment-related challenges.
That the COD segment is likely to shrink from 60 per cent to 40 per cent despite the growing market is a sign of increasing customer confidence on the payment process. While there might be multiple payment aggregators in the country and some may begin their operations soon, there is hardly any investment in the payment platform for enabling multiple payment process and payment gateways using the fully outsourced payment platform.
Emvantage developed one of the most robust payment platforms to provide an Indian payment infrastructure to online merchants, banks and merchant aggregators. The platform has been carefully developed using the global best practices that meet the needs of social media payments for increasing multiple channels of revenue through single integration. The platform has been developed with the objective of providing higher transaction success rate than the presently available infrastructure. The improved architecture is ready to handle the growth of online transaction volumes over the next decade.
Q. Choosing a reliable payment gateway can be a daunting task for any e-tailer. What factors should be kept in mind while choosing the payment gateway and how does Emvantage help retailers with their payment process?
Yes, for an online retailer, selecting a payment gateway can be a difficult task considering the fact that very few payment gateways have differentiation among their products and services. In the absence of value addition, decisions are taken on commercial proposals. Emvantage with its offering of increasing the channels of revenue and providing higher transaction success rate along with global best practices provides key differentiators to the e-commerce industry in India. We are largely focusing on the top brands and online merchants who need our services the most. Using Emvantage some of the large retailer have been able to increase their revenue without increasing their cost.
We are also the first payment gateway to launch a fully mobile responsive page along with dedicated process for transactions coming from mobile phones. Of late the online customers have caught the payment industry off guard as heavy failures were observed from payment gateways for transactions originating from mobile phones. With Emvantage Mobile First strategy, we provide readily available solutions, which modify the process depending upon the combination of mobile phone browser and the mobile phone OS, so that seamless success transaction can be delivered irrespective of the mobile phone used.
Online retailers should consider the following four aspects while selecting a payment gateway:
- The payment gateway should have a mobile responsive page to handle mobile transactions seamlessly.
- The payment gateway should be based on latest technology using the global best practices for providing higher success rate.
- The payment gateway should provide multiple channels of revenue through Facebook Buy Button, E-Mail Payments, Pay Now Button for Social Media, Invoice Payments, QR Code based payments, etc.
- The payment gateway should provide EMI options from leading card issuing banks.
- Good service and relationship with the merchant is one of the most important factors for selecting the payment gateway, as ultimately the merchant and payment gateways should work in tandem to make the relationship successful.
Value cautious merchants look for the quality of the transaction responses and use the payment gateway infrastructure to increase the channels of revenue.
Q. Do you think that online transactions have increased in India? Are customers now more confident about making payments online?
The number of Indian online shoppers will double in the next two years from 20 million to 40 million, upping the online shopping from current 2B to 8.5B[Check: Rs. 2 billion to Rs. 8 billion?] by 2016 at CAGR of 63 per cent. The confidence of Indian online shoppers is demonstrated from the increased average order value, which has doubled in the last two years and is likely to double by 2016 again. The confidence of Indian online shopper is demonstrated by the 2014 report of Accel Partner, which says:
- Last year, there was a significant rise in average order value as there was a penetration of new categories like jewellery, home décor, etc.
- Also, users are becoming more comfortable buying higher priced items online.
- Last year saw the rise of the fashion category – fashion e-commerce GMV doubled since 2012.
- The online shoppers segment will see 400 per cent growth in the next 3 years and rival electronics and mobile category in GMV.
Emvantage’s Payment on Delivery Solution (PoD) has replaced CoD and has reduced hassles of bringing the cash back to merchant. In the PoD transactions, the money reaches the online merchant on T+2 basis, while in takes long for the same in CoD process.
Q. Please tell us about Emvantage? Also, discuss your e-commerce and m-commerce payment gateway services and its USP.
Emvantage Payments is founded by payment professionals with over 125 man-years of experience in payment domain. With my exposure to payment solutions during my job on MasterCard as Director – Advanced Payments Solutions and in Ingenico India as CEO, we have tried to implement the global best practices of the payment domain in Emvantage. Our mobile payment solution has evolved after much research on mobile browsers and OS behaviour with 3D secure page and netbanking links. This has led to Emvantage delivering a seamless mobile responsive page with highest transaction success rate.
Our mobile first strategy helps us test all new development with mobile testing infrastructure to suit the evolving mobile payment space needs. We believe this investment in the mobile first strategy will help us in the long way and give us the advantage of being a seamless mobile responsive payment gateway.
Q. How have you tailored your offerings to suit the needs of Indian e-commerce players?
Emvantage is the next-generation, fully integrated online payment platform for acquiring payment card transactions over the Internet and mobile for seamless transactions with adequate speed, security and data integrity.
While this is the best in class solution, today’s online merchant requires multiple channels of online growth including social media, e-mail and mobile. The additional revenue opportunity through the innovation and creativity of Emvantage team helps the online merchant with the following opportunities:
- ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ – Emvantage EMI payment solution of leading card-issuing banks.
- Facebook ‘Pay Now’ button – Payment transactions for Facebook campaigns and advertisements.
- QR Code Payments – For online and paper advertisement.
- E-mail ‘Click To Pay’ Communication – For cancelled/declined transactions.
- Mobile responsive page.
- Tokenisation for mobile customers.
- Express payment for easing repeat customer buying processes.
- Seasonal promotional campaigns for targeted promotion across customer segments.
- iFrame based payment box.
- Event and campaign payment management.
- Batch processing.
Q. Please share the list of your e-commerce clients/partners.
Emvantage payment platform is trusted by some of the largest names in Indian e-commerce industry including Yepme, Haldiram’s, Bookmyshow, ShopClues, Paper Boat, Delhivery, Videocon, Noida Authority, FIEO and others.
We work closely with MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Rupay (National Payment Corporation of India) on various innovations in payments and for growth of the acceptance of online payments.
Q. How much time does your payment gateway take to integrate with the e-commerce platform?
We provide ready APIs to developers for integration with 50+ leading shopping carts. This includes API for integration with shopping carts Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Zen Cart, CubeCart, WHMCS, etc. and languages like DotNET, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, etc.
These kits help the developer in integrating the payment gateway within 2–3 days. These are followed by the test cases and pre-production QC done by pour [ceck]team to ensure high quality of integration for highest transaction success rate.
Q. What is the fee structure that you charge for your services?
We have customised offers for our merchants depending upon the merchant segment like e-commerce, education, utility or government merchants. The flexibility to develop a price proposal as per merchant needs, gives us the additional advantage. For large merchants, our price proposal is related to the additional success rate we deliver so that our revenue contribution to the balance sheet of the merchant is clearly visible.
Q. What are the available payment options at Emantage? What is your refund and cash back policy like?
The payment types, security processes, features and capabilities of Emvantage online payment platform are appended below:
- Visa, MasterCard, American Express credit and prepaid cards
- Visa. MasterCard, Maestro, Visa Electron and Rupay debit cards
- Netbanking of leading banks with over 200 million bank accounts covering 80 per cent of Indian bank accounts
- Mobile wallets and prepaid cards
Q. What innovative online payment solutions do you provide to your clients?
Emvantage has been developed with the objective of bringing the latest technology and resources together with continuous system enhancement keeping pace with the evolving, industry best standards.
Some of the unique features of Emvantage payment gateway are:
- Online refund with full or partial refund option
- Online capture with full or partial capture option
- Merchant’s checkout page with dedicated merchant account
- Auto-capture option, auto invoicing facility and CRM-based billing module.
- Strong CRM and data analytics capability with capture time scheduler.
- Unsuccessful transaction return to payment page for another effort.
Dedicated merchant administration tool for the following transaction status viewing and action:
- Authorisation, capture, settlement
- Void, failed transaction view, refund, reversal
- Chargeback support
- Payment remittance tracking and payment status updated from transaction to remittance through dedicated merchant account.
- State-of-the-art ‘Level 4 data centre’.
- Unlimited transaction bandwidth, redundancy and 99.995 per cent uptime.
- Advanced networking architecture.
Q. How do you ensure the security of your online payment environment? What all you are doing to tackle the issue of fraud detection and risk mitigation?
Emvantage, a PCIDSS 2.0 certified payment processing environment is one among the best in industry standards in data security, fraud prevention and transaction processing. Over 125 man-years of experience of Emvantage founding team in the payment domain comes handy in implementing one of the most secure payment infrastructures.
We have a dedicated modular risk management solution that we offer to our merchants for them to filter the unwanted fraudulent transactions. Our advanced fraud detection tool, which works on Heuristic fraud detection and fraud pattern forecasting method, is one among the industry’s best and most advanced.
Q. As an industry expert, what you think are the key trends driving evolving payment gateway strategies and streamlining payment acceptance solutions?
The mobile segment is fast emerging as the major source of our revenue. With the increase in internet speed and bandwidth quality, rural India is likely to emerge as a fast growing customer segment. The logistics of managing delivery in rural areas would remain a challenge for the growing online retail segment. The growth of multiple channels of revenue like social media, e-mail, etc. is fast emerging as the communication media. It seems mobile, rural segment, social media payment and good risk management solution would define the growth of the upcoming online payment industry.
