Launching of Payment gateway on Pay1 Merchant

We have always aimed to make the retailer’s business easy and so time in and time out we have worked towards either making the existing product better or coming up with new technologically innovative products/ features on our app through which they can run their businesses smoothly.

With all the provisions that we provide to our retailers through our platform, filling in the loopholes is the primary focus of all our services. Our services are pre-dominantly customer-focused, where we very earnestly take into consideration our retailer’s feedbacks and requirements and then go about building our apps, its products and its features.

One such problem area that we have been longing to solve for the retailer was easy availability of money. So we recently launched the Payment gateway feature on our platform to solve all the, then existing problems.

The previous process was long drawn out and also a little complicated for the retailer and so we thought of simplifying it by introducing payment gateway on our platform.

The payment gateway system is more or less like a semi-closed wallet, where the retailer can hoard digital money and then use it to his convenience.

As mentioned before the previous process was lengthy and involved a lot of steps. To load money in his digital wallet, he had to first reach out to the distributor and the distributor would then reach out to us. The digital money that the distributor had received from us would then be sent to the retailer. There were also certain limitations to this method, such as prolonged waiting time in case of holidays and non-banking days.

Now, because of the Payment gateway option, the retailer’s wallet can be loaded at the drop of a hat and it negates the need for multiple steps.

This has made the process very seamless, quick and easy with reduced waiting time for the retailer and easy access to digital money which is a primary need for people carrying out small businesses. 

The payment gateway allows payments through various modes such as Credit Card, Debit Card, UPI and also Net Banking.

The payment gateway is a great addition to our bucket of features and services that are focused on solving retailer’s day to day issues and problems. The retailer community until a few years back largely believed in carrying out their businesses offline.

 It’s great to see how times have changed and our retailers have readily started accepting digital modes of payments to run their businesses which were largely offline otherwise. 

Bill Payments Campaign – Terms and Conditions

Terms and condition:

  • This contest is just for Pay1 retailers.
  • This contest is valid from 20th October to 20th January.
  • There is no predetermined process to participate in the contest, the retailer can win lucrative rewards under this contest by doing their regular business.
  • The contest winners will be chosen according to the bill payment transaction. The higher the number of transaction the more the chances of winning.
  • The retailers who are on top of the leaderboard will be awarded gold coins.
  • Pay1 reserves all rights to change the contest or disable it completely.
  • Before selecting and awarding all winners of the contest, some documents will be demanded from the winner.
  • Pay1 reserves the right to give the winner an amount equal to the prize or any other reward if the prizes are shown are not available.

Interview with Chetan Yadav: Technologist, Opportunist and Analyst.

Where should a hardworking, talented, young technologist look for opportunities to build his skills and set out a thriving career path? In an organisation that values learnability and aspirations over skills and illustrious credentials. This is the trajectory Chetan chose when he joined Pay1, a retail – tech platform for unorganised retailers to offer consolidated services which will increase their revenue streams. In conversation with Chetan Yadav, exploring how Pay1 paved the way to growing skillset and a promising career.

Q: How would you explain your current role at Pay1?

Chetan: Currently, I am a database admin and also a network analyst for serversecurity. This means that I am the first line of defense protecting the Pay1’snetwork and its digital/customer assets from any unwanted hacking or networkintrusion.

Q: How has Pay1 helped you grow as a professional?

Chetan: Firstly Pay1 has shown me that the keenness to learn is above the skills youalready possess. When I joined Pay1, four years back, I knew tools likeWireshark and had worked on Linux before, hence started as a Linux admin. I waskeen to learn, and incidentally, during that period my colleagues working ondatabase and security systems needed some help. I started assisting them byfirst taking detailed instructions and eventually figuring out on my own.Gradually it becomes a part of my role. My skills expanded and so did myprofile.

Here everyone helps each other learn and grow. My seniors also taught me many skills and trusted me with responsibilities I did not think I could handle. They showed trust in me and I become more confident of myself.

Q: How would you describe the work culture at Pay1?

Chetan: This organisation gives people the freedom to grow, makemistakes, experiment, and learn. In fact, a lot of my professional growth andpersonal growth can be attributed to my colleagues and seniors.

I clearly remember those first few weeks when I joined Pay1, I was unable to handle the work, mainly because I was new to the process.  I was directly reporting to the CTO, Mr. Ashish Arya. And that time while his plate was full of work and travel, he provided me with enormous support, guidance and handholding. He explained me procedures over the phone when not in the office, or sat with me and explained work when in office. He also encouraged few colleagues to help me. Gradually I started finding my way, making friends and become familiar with the process and practices. Since then it has been a very smooth journey of learning and growing. And as for him, he has always been accessible and approachable for me, becoming my mentor and a professional anchor.

He involves us in decision making, we brainstorm together and our suggestions are not just welcome but implemented also.

We aim to provide retailers with digital, financial and business solutions such that each small business and retail store can use technology to expand their business offerings. Want to know more? Register today.

Q: How would you describe the dynamics between colleagues?

Chetan: I think a large part of my career growth, my promotions, and newskillset is due to the support of my colleagues. That sums up the dynamicsbetween teams and co-workers.

Q: Your message to aspiring professionals like yourself?

Chetan:  Always be a sponge who is ready to learn and don’t be afraid of facing challenges, because challenges and failures are the best way to grow.

A game that’s got all the retailer’s spinning!

India is a country that embraces a number of religions and cultural diversities. While every person here marches to the beat of different drums, there’s this one thing that brings everyone together. One game! Cricket! For us Indians, cricket is not just a game but an emotion! It’s a religion that unites all the people together. In every gully and corner of an Indian city, town, village you will find at least one kid who wants to be Dhoni while some other friend of his wants to be Virat.

It made a lot of sense to develop an exciting activity around ‘Cricket’ for our retailers on the Pay1 platform but a tiny hurdle here was to come up with a game that was easy to play and also engaging enough.

Pay1 ‘Predict & Win’ has a very easy to use interface since it was developed keeping in mind the retailer audience. There he has to predict answers to certain questions and based on the number of correct answers he will score points. The questions are updated with each new match. Also, the leaderboard is updated every week so that the retailers get to know their standing in the contest.

Pay1 ‘Predict and Win’ was a big hit! We had over 20,000 retailers playing the game throughout and the first prize winner scored 15,990 points! The retailers thoroughly enjoyed this new feature of gamification on the Pay1 app. It helped us gain a lot of traction and attention from retailers around.  With every new match, the retailer count kept going higher. The entire predict and win the contest that ran for about two months gave the retailers something more to look forward to other than just work. The entire game series helped us develop a casual and friendly connection with our retailers for the game they love the most.

The Predict & Win module 1 ended with the World cup and we got our winners for the contest. The first winner took home a ‘Bajaj CT 100’ and the second winner won a ‘Lenovo V 145’ laptop.

After a huge success, now we have a Round-2 coming up of the same contest around the India tours West Indies and South Africa tours India matches. The contest terms and conditions remain the same this time as well but the winners stand a chance to win more exciting prizes. The retailers who missed out on winning in the previous Predict &Win contest now have an opportunity to be a part of this fun contest and win themselves various prizes.

In addition to this contest, we have a few more features that will add to the engagement and give a better user experience to the retailers. At Pay1, we always think about how we can serve our retailer audience better. We try to make it a cohesive platform by not just focusing on increasing their earnings and accelerating their small businesses but also by improving their overall experience. Gamification in a way has helped us to achieve the same while appreciating the retailer audience for their knowledge about cricket and also connect with them on a better level.

The resurgence of dukaandar

It’s a busy Sunday afternoon; Ramesh has a number of customers stocking up their daily needs from his small kirana shop. He has been running this shop in the tier 2 city of India unhindered for the past 20 years now. He knows his customers in and out. In fact, it’s like a guided shopping experience for each of his customers which usually reside in a radius of few kilometres. Right from the milk required for the morning cup of tea to the salt required for the last meal of the day, Ramesh has everything in his store.

This shop is his main source of income. Being in the same business for the past two decades, he has seen the changing waves the retail industry has gone through. 

Currently, there are more than 15 million retail stores spread across our country. Majority of them concentrated in tier 2 and 3 market. 

Over the years the small retail sector of India has faced many challenges, starting with the organised supermarkets, malls and then the wave of online retail and various grocery shopping apps.

To have their foot firm in the industry and not be swept away, the retailers are now making use of digitisation. The year 2016 has played a huge role in initiating digital payments and transactions even in the smallest of markets of India. Demonetization has led to a lot of benefits in the retail market in our country. The retailers got comfortable using digital payments as an alternate option at the stores, therefore leading to digital empowerment. 3 years back there were hardly any kiranas that accepted digital payments.

The offline retail industry has been subject to a lot of good changes since then. The decision of letting digitization into their business was one of the first and major steps that the retailers took to combat business giants of the country.

Interpersonal relationships have always been an athriving force in boosting and maintaining small businesses. A retailer knows exactly what his customer wants and also most of the times suggest something that they would prefer using over the other.  This is only possible because he has known his customers and their choices for years now while sharing a cordial relationship with them.

This is one thing that the organised retail sector lacks and has always tried hard to build a relationship with the customers that come to their platform. On the other hand, it’s a win-win situation for the unorganised retailers since they already have the advantage of being the quest of good relationships and are now also exploring the digital platforms.

The convenience and trust that the customer has on his/her retailer play a vital role. The retailer has to maintain a long term relationship with his new customers and therefore he would never sell something that would put his business at stake. If a situation like that arises the customer has the benefit of easy and quick replacement.

If a similar situation arises in online retail, where a warped product is delivered to your doorstep, there is a long process and number of people involved in replacing it. It is a more time-consuming procedure which involves dealing with a chain of people. Also, the need of the day to day products is rather prompt and not many people have the luxury of time to wait for its replacement. This eventually leads to them buying the same product from a nearby mom and pop stores.

These are some of the old effortless strategies the dukaandars have been using to stay on the top of the retail game.  Additionally, the dukaandars have now also started adapting to the technological advancements to automate and drive customer engagement and be at par with discount stores, e-commerce and modern trade.

Most of the Indians even now prefer an actual shopping experience as compared to ordering their products from a faceless gadget because of a number of factors as stated above. The offline retail industry of India has ingeniously been battling with the takeover of big online retail businesses. With the help of apps like Pay1 making use of digital payments and transactions for their customers has become easy and is further helping them to etch their existence in the retail market of India. A platform like ours has always supported the same cause even before digitisation took off in the country. We have been trying to promote micro-entrepreneurship and increase their earning potential through various services available on our platform. Hence, being a catalyst to the growth of offline retail markets of India.

Domestic Money Transfer and the changing scenarios

We have time and again written about our merchants and how they are the agents of change in their locality, inspiring the masses and enabling them through various digital services and promoting the benefits of the same. In our blogs, we have already mentioned about our products like Pay1 Digi and how it has been equipping the retailers with cardinal services and earn substantial benefit from them.

Out of all the services mentioned in our previous blogs, Pay1 Merchant’s DMT and recharge services have been one of our oldest services. A few years back when the digital transactions were unsettled and open to discussion, it was the Money transfer services that helped people transfer money to any corner of the country. To put into simple words, Domestic Money Transfer is a service offered by various companies/agencies to transfer money from one account to another account within the country. The end customer first deposits the required amount to the DMR agent (Domestic money remittance) The money, received by the DMR agent(in our case  Pay1 retailer), is transfer processed using National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT) and Immediate Payment service (IMPS) technology to the receiver.

There has been continuous migration of people in search of growth and better opportunities, thus concentrating the population in the cities. Majority of them are unaware of the technology to transfer money via internet banking and banks become the only option for them to transfer money to their family. Now, since they work on a day to day basis and as contract labourers, they can’t afford to spare one day of work and wait hours in queues of banks for cash deposit or fund transfer. It was in these scenarios that the DMT services helped to solve the problem of money transfer within the country for these migrants who worked as daily wage workers to send money to their hometown. Now they don’t need to stand hours waiting in the bank to send money, with the help of a money transfer agent he can transfer money to their family instantly.

From the very start, the DMT services always had a very wide scope because of its comparatively cheap and reliable nature. It helped to transfer money to anywhere in India in a very short time. It is also a much-secured pathway for the same. With the advent of technology and digitalisation, the DMT services were then transformed from desktop-centric to mobile screen-centric. One of the major advantages of this service for its end customer is that it doesn’t require the sender to have a bank account. Thus it becomes available to both banked and unbanked population We have been enabling our retailers to provide this service to their customers and also avails retailer with an opportunity to increase their income.  We have been empowering these masses to use these services and experience seamless transactions. It is this model of money transfer that brings the transaction touch-point closer to this set of customers that is available even at non-banking hours.

Thus, through its various products and services, Pay1 is trying to empower the unorganised retailers by equipping them with a platform to provide various services like domestic money transfer, AEPS, mPOS, utility, bill payments, online mobile recharges and many more at one place. The Pay1 platform works in unison with the retailers, products and services, distributors and the last mile customers towards creating value at every touch point.

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

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