The Landscape of Payment Solutions

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Wallets are the new craze in the payment industry. Thanks to the ease of payment that it provides, the wallet companies have seen immense success in today's world. Paytm, one of the wallets in the market, alone experienced a rise of 423% during the fourth quarter of 2016. It has become an acceptable mode of payment by many. There are times though, when a major confusion arises between wallets and online payment gateways. Both of them are part of the online payment solutions. There is a very simple difference between these 2 things. Let us help you understand the same.

Payment gateways ensure that the customer can make the payment using any of the payment methods of his/her choice. The person has to enter his details every time he/she wants to make a payment. Let's say, Mr. A goes to an e-commerce site and wants to purchase a shirt. He adds it to his cart and proceeds to payment. When on the payment page, he will be required to choose a payment option out of the available ones. The options can be net-banking, card payment, wallets or UPI. Once he selects the option he wants, he has to enter the card/account details and make the payment. Everything happens online and there is no external downloads that the person needs to do. It is basically a facilitating technology to provide all the available payment methods in a single place.

When it comes to wallets, any individual who wishes to pay through it, should first download the app, create an account and then add money into the same. In layman terms, it is very similar to the wallets you carry in your pockets. You have money stored with you and whenever the need be, you can take that money out and make the payment. This process however will require a payment gateway in the backend to process all the payments. If we consider online payment methods as a universal set (U), then wallets become a subset of the same (W). The other subsets can be net-banking (N), cards (C), UPI (UPI).

You can get a clear idea if you see the below diagram.

Keeping this in mind, if we now tell you that Easebuzz is an online payment solution and not a wallet, we hope you will be able to understand the difference. Easebuzz provides all available online payment methods (wallet being one of them). It has the facility to collect payments through links or int

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Rohit Prasad Business head for Easebuzz