E-commerce sites record increase in digital payments

“On Voonik platforms, e-wallet usage has increased significantly after the demonetisation announcement. Earlier COD was the most preferred mode of payment, now e-wallets are getting popular,” Sujayath Ali, co-founder of Voonik, told Fibre2Fashion.

Card-on-delivery has been a preferred mode for Amazon India's customers, while Flipkart resorted to wallet cash-backs to encourage its customers to go digital.

“Electronic payments at doorstep have gone up by a factor of 10X. This clearly indicates that customers are able to adapt to electronic payment methods when cash is constrained. We continue to focus on helping people shift to making payments electronically,” said an Amazon India spokesperson.

“The government's decision has given a big push to the adoption of digital instruments such as wallets and Unified Payment Interface. In the last few days, we witnessed a lot of movement towards electronic transactions and we expect the economy to further support this change. To encourage customers to adopt other payment modes, we also introduced wallet cash-backs, which are being actively used by multiple sellers and brands,” said Flipkart in a statement.

Speaking about Voonik's agenda for tackling liquidity crunch, Ali said, “We have integrated all major digital wallets. Soon we will also start card-on-delivery through our major courier partners. So we are all set to tackle the immediate liquidity crunch at the customer level and the future movement to cash-less transactions.”

When asked if this shift towards digitisation is temporary or long term, Ali said, “We cannot expect that this will change shoppers' behaviour in the short term. But it will result in a better customer experience and thus a higher repeat behaviour over time.”

Meanwhile, Indian e-retailers who had temporarily stopped accepting COD orders, have announced that the payment mode is back on track and the cap on the amount for COD orders has also been withdrawn.

Soon after the November 8 announcement, top e-commerce players in India had witnessed cancellations of COD orders that were placed before the government's decision to ban the currency notes. Snapdeal's co-founder Kunal Bahl said that COD orders on the e-commerce site have reduced to 30 per cent of the overall sales in about a week after the ban.

“There are a couple of challenges due to higher COD orders across all e-commerce players. About 70 per cent of our customers are from tier II and tier III cities of the country and all are women. So for us COD is a major payment mode. Thus, this sudden ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes has impacted the order volume,” added Ali. (KD)

ALCHEMPro News Desk – India