'Payment gateways should be made more convenient'

With India offering immense potential for e-commerce companies to grow, e-commerce firms should make their payment gateways more convenient keeping in mind the Reserve Bank of India guidelines, according to Ramkumar Narayanan, general manager (product development centre) at eBay India.

“Using a credit or debit acard is not easy in our country; there are several factors like one-time password and double authentication method that make the use of a card a cumbersome process.

"The challenge for the e commerce companies is to make it smooth,” said Narayanan.

He added if the issue is not solved, cash-on-delivery would remain the most primary method of payment.

Recently, the central bank has asked online cab service provider Uber to rework its billing system to enable two-step authentication system.

Following this, many have dubbed the central bank’s decision as regressive.

Narayanan, however, feels there is scope for innovation even while following the RBI regulations.

“The primary duty of RBI is to safeguard the user’s interest, the regulations are there for a reason, the challenge is to develop a new system following the regulations,” he said.

He added companies have already started using the online wallets to overcome this problem.

Since a major part of the sales is coming from tier-2 and tier-3 cities, eBay India is focusing to provide more languages other than English for its website.

“We would like to address that by slicing the market into various categories; certain languages like Hindi, Bengali and Tamil will stand out more than the others, so we would like to make our platform smooth for them,” he said.

According to Narayanan, building trust with the customer should be of paramount interest for the companies. He said eBay has been able to do that with PaisaPay.

“When PaisaPay was developed, the company was focused on not to just provide it as a payment gateway, but also as a trust-mechanism.

"In this, both the seller and the buyer enjoy a protection mechanism; hence, it clicked in the market.”

While increasing customer base is important, Narayanan said companies should focus on making their technical front foolproof. “If you don’t have a sound technology, e-commerce is no different from a normal market,” he said.