Indian Startup Razorpay Launches Payment Gateway ‘Button’

Razorpay, the leading full-stack financial services company, today launched Payment Buttons for empowering startups to accept payments on their own website. Payment button enables businesses and freelancers to add a single line of code on their website or blog and go live with an integrated payment gateway, in less than 5 minutes. This is a move attempted to corner the market of the rapidly digitizing small businesses amid the ongoing pandemic.

The feature called the ‘Payment Button’ will enable businesses and freelancers to add a single line of code on a website or blog and go live with a payment gateway “within a few minutes,” a senior company executive told ET. Traditionally, this process takes up to a few hours and requires back-end developer support. The Bengaluru-based payment player is looking to onboard at least 10,000 start-ups, SMEs, NGOs, and freelancers in the first three months of its launch, the executive added.

“The current situation has got all businesses feeling the pain to varying degrees, but it’s independent businesses that are hurting the most,” said Shashank Kumar, CTO, and co-founder at Razorpay. “One of our immediate priorities is to help startups and freelancers weather this storm with intelligent payment solutions to build a more resilient business.”

Kumar claims that the new product will need no technical integrations or back-end support and can be almost instantaneously set up for collecting digital payments through cards, wallets, and UPI.

The digital shift has been followed by an increased preference for digital payments over the physical currency. The launch comes at a time when most small businesses are moving online to provide digital services to ply their trades due to COVID-19-related disruptions in their physical operations. Over the five months of the lockdown, Razorpay claims that it clocked a 30% month-on-month growth in payments from micro-entrepreneurs.

Kumar said that while none of the major gateway players in India offer instantaneous integration service, Payment Button is like PayPal’s APIs in the United States, with a flow customized for the Indian market.

Meanwhile, Kumar also said that transaction volumes on its platform have largely normalized and started registering growth for most sectors except for fuel, aviation, hospitality, and its lending service on the neo-banking service.