Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshilmathur | Hacker News Reader

Co-founder Harshil here. We built this when we saw how the payments experience was a mess in India compared to the western world. The payments in India are much more complex than USA and Europe because of the strict regulation, multiple payment methods and unreliable bank gateways among other things. Consequently, the on-boarding experience sucks and failure rates are in double digits. We aim to tackle these issues and shield the merchant from them, to provide a seamless, easy to integrate experience. If you have any questions, fire my way!

View on HN

First up, congrats to you and Kumar. It takes a tremendous effort to tackle something like this in India.

0. How does your product compare against juspay.in and payzippy (which I believe has been discontinued)?

1. How much development do you plan to do open source?

2. Who have been your mentors?

Merci.

0 - Payzippy was discontinued. And even so, their offerings were not much different from other gateways in the country.

Juspay offers their integration on top of other gateways. Thus, it solves only part of the problem, since you still have to deal with tough onboarding process.

1 - We are very grateful of the open-source community and do plan to give back to it in whatever ways we can. Follow our github organisation and you will not be disappointed.

2 - YC partners are really great and have provided most of the mentoring we needed. Plus, other YC companies alums form a very strong network which help you out when you need it.

Any mentors from the Indian start-up scene that you've looked to advice for?

Yes, Chintan Bakshi from Jaipur helped us during pre-YC days.

would like to hear about your YC experience - especially as an India-focused-and-returning-to-India-after-YC startup.

This has been fairly new on YC's side and would like to hear from you what your view is.

YC experience has been really awesome. Whether you are in India or anywhere, noone can help your startup as much as YC can. We will do a separate blog post on that soon to explain it in more detail.

This sounds like a really awesome startup. I'd love to know if you are ever looking to hire a software engineer (~2 years experience).

I work on an Indian e-commerce site, so just from contact with my friends on our payments team I know how complicated payments are in India.

Sure, just drop an email: shashank@razorpay.com

Great work, and thanks for coming forward to answer the questions. If I were to build a funnel for payments (banks/insurance/corporates at one end and small merchants/SOHO stores/utility services at the other) how easy or difficult is it to use razorpay's services (considering a team of two with decent full-stack programming experience)? What sort of legalities would I be bound with Razorpay along with the vendors/entities at the receiving/sending endpoints?

If this isn't a right forum for this question, can I drop a mail to discuss further?

Thanks again!

Hi, what you need is a marketplace. While, we do support that, it takes time to get approvals for it. Please drop us a mail at contact@razorpay.com and we can discuss this further on how to speed it up for your use case.

Thanks. One of my friends was looking at building a bill pay portal (akin to freecharge) with a wider set of endpoints. Will get further questions clarified via an email.

And BTW, the API docs via readme.io - real good!

Sure, drop us an email at contact@razorpay.com and we can take that further.

Yeah, Readme is part of current YC batch, they are awesome!

Thanks for the props, Harshil! ReadMe is psyched to be working with you; you've done a great job with our product!

I know you guys have used Stripe like experience to describe razorpay. We used to use Payzippy which was similar though had a few glaring differences.

I had a couple of questions as we need something like this.

Could you outline the differences due to the legal framework? Do you allow tokens/can customers save cards?, what about 3Dsecure? Can we use POST like api calls or do we use a very customisable iframe? Can you guys do pre-authorisations (such as when capture is false on the stripe api when you create a charge)?

Payzippy was better but still was cumbersome to integrate, we have a much easier experience, you can checkout https://docs.razorpay.com for more info. - We do not support card tokenisation right now, it is in roadmap. - We do support 3D secure but handle it compeltely on our end, the merchant need not worry about handling it. - Right now, we provide iframe integration, but we will support POST calls very soon. Frankly, not many customers have asked for it. - We support Authorization and Capture Based payment but yeah pre-auths like those in US are not supported because of regulatory hurdles.

Formatted:

- Payzippy was better but still was cumbersome to integrate, we have a much easier experience, you can checkout https://docs.razorpay.com for more info.

- We do not support card tokenisation right now, it is in roadmap.

- We do support 3D secure but handle it compeltely on our end, the merchant need not worry about handling it.

- Right now, we provide iframe integration, but we will support POST calls very soon. Frankly, not many customers have asked for it.

- We support Authorization and Capture Based payment but yeah pre-auths like those in US are not supported because of regulatory hurdles.

How do you handle recurring payments without the user having to enter their PIN (or whatever again). I'm talking about subscriptions like in Stripe?

Also, how do you get around the step where the user is redirected to the bank page to enter the 3D secure pin / internet banking password / IPIN?

We currently don't support recurring payments, but it is in the plans. It won't be as easy as in US-based gateways since recurring payments are not really supported by RBI.

Harshil and shk answered this here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250136

Hey Harshil,

This looks good! What details do I need for activation? Can you charge customers in other currencies?

You can just signup in 2 minutes and start using it in test mode. Meanwhile, you can fill the activation form with basic KYC stuff to go live. The activation form should take you about 15 minutes to fill with everything on hand. Right we only support charging in INR but we do support international transactions. Support for other currencies will be coming shortly.

This looks great! We recently setup an e-commerce site in India that is using the ICICI payment gateway and it took us over 2 weeks for all the paperwork, setup and integration. Plus the initial setup cost was substantially more than 5K. Just to confirm - are you saying that you have reduced that entire process down to just 15 minutes? If so, that is just an incredible feat and kudos to you and your team. Just a few questions -

- How are you validating the customer's business information and bank details?

- How do your transaction fees compare to ICICI and the others?

- Do you have modules/plugins for integration with any of the popular e-commerce platforms? ( We are using Nopcommerce)

Hey, thanks for the kind words. The activation form will require 15 minutes to fill up and we can take you live in a day or two after that. - We are using PAN and CIN api from govt. of India to verify a lot of details. We ask for the scans of few proof documents (much less than others). - Our transaction fees are on our website http://razorpay.com - We do provide integration plugins for almost all eCommerce platforms including nopcommerce

Great - thanks! We will be certainly signing up soon. We have a couple of other projects in the works that can benefit from this as well.

@t3ra I don't see a reply button below your answer. By bank side "security-check" do you mean 3dsecure? If so, then we handle it and the website doesn't need to do custom modification because of it.

(You have to wait for sometime before reply appears -- i guess)

During the initial onboarding process and filling paper work, we were told the site will do through a specific "bank-side security check" in which the bank officials will check the site for security issues.

Also we were forced to add links to ToS, privacy policy, etc on the first page of the website or else they wont give us the damn PG (even after the pages were visibly linked on the "shop" part of the site)

Hi, Yeah those links are mandatory by Indian banks but we do provide templates for them that you can modify for your use case. And as long the links are on your site, we will handle the rest (visibility etc.)

Atleast you guys have templates :D

Best of luck guys... And start accepting bitcoins soon ;p

Thanks. We will do it soon :)

Is there no "bank side security check" (we were forced to add a specific "e-commerce flow" to the website because of it)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com