Online payment gateway Instamojo says demonetisation boosted usage of its services
Instamojo expects to have one million SME merchants by March 2018
New Delhi: Online payment gateway Instamojo Technologies Pvt. Ltd Monday said demonetisation has pushed up the use of its service by small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
“While retail stores, street vendors and technology enterprises like e-commerce have found their payment solution in point of sale (PoS) machines, digital wallets and payment gateways respectively, but 47 million small & micro SMEs haven’t. Instamojo is filling that big gap in the market with its offering across mobile and web," said chief executive officer of Instamojo, Sampad Swain in a statement.
Instamojo provides multiple online payment options such as cards, net-banking, wallets and unified payments interface (UPI) in its gateway. Any entrepreneur or SME can link its product to a payment link generated by Instamojo and share the link on WhatsApp, SMS, email or Facebook to request for payment.
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Instamojo claims to have added more than 3,000 online SMEs every day, a 1500% jump from its usual daily average, since the government withdrew high-value notes on 8 December.
The company says its merchant network has increased to over 200,000 which includes individual sellers, freelancers, home-based entrepreneurs and SMEs—they digitally collect payments and use its e-commerce platform to sell online. The company claims that 65% of the merchants are from non-metro cities.
“Instamojo requires only bank account & mobile phone to get started unlike alternatives which require hardware installation (PoS machines), artificial restrictions ideal for micro transactions (wallets) or technical integration (payment gateways)" added Swain.
The company expects to have one million SME merchants by March 2018, the statement said.
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Digital payment companies have signed up a large number of customers since the announcement on demonetisation and introduced new solutions for merchants. Digital wallet companies such as Paytm and Mobikwik have claimed to deploy 10,000 people on ground to sign up offline retailers and street side vendors, among others.
On 24 November, Paytm introduced a product feature that allows a merchant’s smartphone to act as a point of sale (PoS) machine, accepting payments through debit and credit cards.
Four days later, Mobikwik launched MobiKwik Lite, a lighter version of its mobile app, to boost its network of small merchants. A merchant can request a payment by sending a link to the customer through an SMS. The link directs the user to a payment gateway to make payment through multiple channel options, while the merchant receives the payment in its Mobikwik wallet.
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