From a student raising around Rs 6 lakh for her teacher’s treatment (20 years after her school days) in Delhi, to someone from the other part of the world raising funds to manufacture and sell fidget cubes for attention-deficit individuals, people have turned to crowdfunding for almost everything and anything.
Crowdfunding, sometimes also known as crowdsourcing, is the practice of raising funds in small denominations from a large number of people for a specific cause such as to fund treatment, pay underprivileged children’s school fees, or even to get an innovative business up and running.
The first recorded crowdfunding endeavour can be traced back to 1997. When British rock band Marillon didn’t have enough funds for their tour, it sent out an email to 1,000 fans saying they would lose $60,000 if they went on the tour. Later, fans decided to source the money among themselves, agreeing to donate money in an escrow account.
Today, the crowdfunding market has grown exponentially. Data analytics firm Statista predicts that the total transaction value in India’s crowdfunding segment will reach USD 7.6 million by the end of this year.
While the first recorded crowdfunding campaign was carried out using emails and cheques, in the more recent times all crowdfunding campaigns are 100% digital where all the payments are processed online. And payment gateways are integral to the process of accepting online donations.
So, naturally, the next question is what all criteria should one keep in mind before integrating a payment gateway to their crowdsourcing platform.
Choosing the right payment gateway for crowdfunding in India
A crowdfunding platform works as good as its payment gateway. So it’s crucial that one weighs in all the pros and cons of different payment gateways depending on what they have to offer.
Here are a few factors to consider when choosing a payment gateway:
- Integration process: Ideally, the integration process should be 100% digital. A truly digital payment gateway will ensure that integration is not complicated and gets over in a few hours. You should consider it a red flag if it takes days to integrate with a particular payment gateway
- Multiple payment modes: Consider working with a payment gateway that can allow donors to send money using the payment mode of their choice. It should support payment modes like netbanking, debit and credit cards, UPI, and even digital wallets
- Quick settlements: For crowdfunding websites that host campaigns for critical healthcare requirements it’s extremely important to receive donors’ money as soon as possible. Check how much time the payment gateway you are in discussion with takes to process settlements
- Data analytics: Although it’s not integral to the payment process, but a payment gateway must provide detailed analytics of the money received so that the crowdfunding platform can tweak campaigns that it hosts accordingly
What Paytm Payment Gateway can do for crowdfunding businesses
In one word: everything.
But let’s break it down to the intimate details of what all Paytm Payment Gateway is capable of doing for crowdfunding businesses.
- Easy onboarding
We are a truly digital company. All the processes, right from the onboarding process to getting started, everything happens virtually. It means there is absolutely no physical paperwork involved. You get to start accepting funds from day one.
Paytm Payment Gateway provides robust APIs and custom SDKs, based on your needs to get you started immediately.
The JS Checkout offering is seamlessly integrated into a crowdfunding business without you having to do anything. Paytm Payment Gateway does all the heavy lifting with the help of APIs. Crowdfunding businesses can do basic customisation such as adding custom colours for branding, prioritise a certain payment mode over the others, etc.
However, if you need to have more control over the checkout experience, we have that option as well. Our custom checkout offering gives you total power to design the checkout process.
- Single-day settlement
We understand the urgency crowdfunding campaigns have, specifically when it involves something critical like healthcare.
That is why Paytm Payment Gateway knows how to act fast and yet ticks all security measures required when it comes to transferring the money to the bank accounts. We clear the settlement process in T+1 days. In plain English, it means you get to see the money in your account in one day. This is true even if there is a holiday.
This is a good opportunity to point out that other payment gateways take a minimum of T+2 days to clear the settlement. And if the day of payment falls on public or bank holiday, this gets further delayed.
Choose wisely, choose Paytm Payment Gateway.
- Multiple payment modes
A large number of donors drop at the last minute because they don’t see the payment mode they want to use to make the donation. The importance of giving donors the freedom to have all the payment options available can’t be stressed enough.
This has been our number one priority.
With Paytm Payment Gateway you will rarely see anyone dropping out of the checkout page because of the lack of payment options. We allow donors to choose either of these payment modes: netbanking, credit and debit cards, UPI payments (including via QR code), and Paytm Wallet.
- International payments
You can take all the crowdfunding campaigns on your platform to international donors with Paytm Payment Gateway.
Indian crowdfunding businesses receive a lot of interest from donors from around the world. NRIs specifically want to give back to the community and to their fellow countrymen.
The ability to accept money from global donors should be the top priority of crowdfunding businesses. Partnering with Paytm Payment Gateway will ensure that you get to accept funds from over 100 countries in INR.
Our checkout page makes it really easy to accept money as well as it’s simple for donors also to wire the money from their local credit cards.
- Robust dashboard
Working with Paytm Payment Gateway means you get to reap the benefits of our dashboard. It allows you to track all the monies that you receive from generous donors, as well as find out if any payment didn’t go through.
You can also use the dashboard to make payouts to your employees and other recurring bills that you might have to pay. The dashboard automates all the payouts so that you focus on your core job.
It gives monthly analytics so that you can learn which payment mode is doing better, which platform is mostly used to send money, etc. These critical data points will help you determine your future decisions.
All these features of Paytm Payment Gateway are designed with just one aim: to increase the number of successful payments for businesses.
As campaigns on your crowdfunding platform achieve their target, more and more crowdfunding campaigns would want to use your platform. So, partner with Paytm Payment Gateway today and start multiplying the number of campaigns on your platform in no time.
