Welcome Offline Payments
Hell No, we are NOT taking about COD (Cash on Delivery) here but it’s one of the payment method which is ready to bring all shy customers who still don’t want to transact online or you can say which will help to bring offline customers to online platform and moreover trust on the payment transaction system in the market.
If you haven’t seen this option or waiting for one to include in your e-commerce portal then this is the right time to go for it as this mode of payment is already very popular in
South East Asia (Doku payment gateway supports it) and
Latin America (Pago Efectivo and Efecty payment gateways)
are few more examples) and now this payment option is entering into Asian countries too. There are various flavours of Offline Payments available and very few Indian Banks are stepping ahead to facilitate Offline Payments and one of them is ICICI Bank which will allow customers to pay for a product reference number using the cash drop at any nearby ICICI bank centre.
How does it Work?
Offline Payment option is interesting in the sense
- The customer visits the merchant portal
- Selects an item/product to purchase
- Chooses Offline Payments option and generates a VOUCHER which allows the user to pay the amount for that voucher by dropping the hard cash using an ATM or Convenience Store or use the same voucher to make the payment using the NetBank account.
- Once amount is paid the Bank/Convenience Store/NetBank will update the Payment Gateway/Processor that the money has been received for the VOUCHER (ref no) via API call
- This information will be passed to the Merchant Callback API with Success/Fail message so that merchant can take a decision to release/ship the product or hold it
Basically, these kind of payments totally rely on the Banks API calls to respond quickly to the Payment Gateway or the Processor (that the amount has been collected for the VOUCHER) and the same information has to be acknowledged to the merchant that now it can go ahead and release or ship the product.
In past we had faced several issues due to the hand shake between Bank to the Payment Gateway and Payment Gateway to the Merchant thus i recommend the merchants to look for “status query” calls from Payment Gateway which can be integrated on demand basis for the latest update of the payment being done by the customer or NOT. This helps to reduce the chances of missing handshake otherwise we need to handle it at reconciliation process.
Please feel free to comment/thoughts on this article :) Happy Payments
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
