KnownSense

The pay button: payment options for Indian developers

An Indian pay story.

The web has some inspiring stories of single developers making it big. If you’ve been coding away with the hope of striking gold someday, you’ve always faced one minor hiccup — getting paid. In India, getting rich requires that you be rich already. Ditto for payment systems, if you aren’t rich already, sorry, you are just too risky to be getting money for work. Hello, Catch 22!

So when Subbu created a simple real-time tool for project management and wanted a “pay button,” I was more than surprised. Usually this is where you give up. But then, believe it or not, Subbu had someone who wanted to pay! And so the search began.

The criteria.

 The providers we looked at included Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, Paypal, CCavenue, EBS, 2Checkout, AlertPay and ZaakPay. Surprisingly though, one of them eventually worked. The requirements for a dev friendly payment system were simple:

• -It had to support recurring billing
• -It should allow easy integration, API, documentation, support
• -It should have charges, commissions, and fees that made sense
• -It should support Indian account access and withdrawals
• -It should accept payments from within India
• -The service needed to be cheap enough for a single developer to use without taking out a mortgage
• -Finally, it was also important the service provider approve the request without a hassle or asking for “multriplicates.”

How did they fare?

Google Checkout, Amazon FPS, Paypal: Given their brand names and amount of tech they commandeer, you’d think that they would be easy, right? Wrong. These are your official sand traps. Dont spend too much time here. A couple of reasons why they probably suck right now:

• -They don’t accept payments from within India.
• -They don’t support recurring billing.

CCavenue: You’ve seen them a couple of times already. Maybe you paid a telephone bill online or bought a book online. They looked a little clunky at the time but yet you kept that in mind as an option to explore. They even accept USD. But…

• -They don’t support recurring billing.
• -Their charges are meant for enterprises. They are expensive for an average -Internet start-up.
• -Their application screening takes about 3 weeks, and if you are a single dev, you are “too risky” for them.

EBS: No recurring payments, no USD, not until April 1st. That date makes me wary and brings back childhood memories of bad jokes. Move on.

2Checkout: These guys came close. But their documentation is horrible. They don’t have a single place where you can find help. Support is also not that great. Next!

ZaakPay: Desi bhais, seem dev friendly, but might be too early right now. But we have some hope with these guys and hope that they make it. Having a dev friendly setup is critical in India. The founder even managed to mail us back! Sweet.

And the winner for now is …

AlertPay: Similar to 2Checkout in that they offer recurring billing, wire transfer and you can define your items/products and a recurring period. They don’t have a joining fee. But they charge 2.5% + 12 INR to withdraw money. They charge another $15 for a wire transfer and $4 for an international cheque. But you need to check if your bank accepts international cheques. They hold your money for 14 days before releasing it your account.

API and help docs on their website were decent. You create plans on your AlertPay account and then use the code it generates to integrate it within your website. They will send you an email and a HTTP post when a customer successfully pays. They also have a cancel subscription API that you can use to programmatically. But it’s still buggy and doesn’t work. You also can’t implement an upgrade/downgrade feature from existing plans. This isn’t smooth.

They have a test mode as well that lets you test the whole e-commerce integration without an actual credit card. Once you are done with testing you can just disable the test mode go wait for the money to start trickling in.

Anyways, if you are a dev and have done something similar, let us know. I know I would love to hear similar war stories. Alternatively, if are a payment service provider, let us know if you meet the above criteria.