Introduction
In e-commerce, the checkout process can be the make-or-break moment for a customer. No matter how pretty your website is or how awesome your products are, if they don’t process the payment, they will walk away.
This was the tough reality for a young e-commerce startup we were working with. They had carts full of products, but they weren’t sold. This was the reason they contacted Playniya.
The Client’s Challenge
The startup was expanding rapidly. They had an excellent product line, an increasing number of customers, and good marketing campaigns. However, one issue continued to plague them—payment gateway failures.
Here’s what was going on:
Customers were getting error messages frequently after submitting their payment information.The UPI payments, which are now extremely popular in India, were failing more than expected.Many customers would stop the transaction and be lost for good after the payment failed.The cart abandonment rates were troublingly high.
In the client’s words: “It was heartbreaking. We had customers ready to pay, but the system would not work. Every time we had a failed payment, it felt like money was slipping away.”
Playniya’s Approach
The first step we took was to get a diagnosis. Rather than focusing on patching the payment gateway, we took a look into transaction logs re-examined user journeys and failure modes-.
We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t simply the fee gateway The issues were around a lack of redundancy and flexibility There was literally no backup plan- for when a payment route failed.
Here is how Playniya approached these issues:
Multi-gateway integration – We integrated multiple payment vendors so that when one failed, the system switched to another vendor requests- automatically.
Failover mechanism – Transactions were rerouted in real time, through intelligent scripting, with the most minimal disruption.
Enhanced UPI – UPI flows were upgraded for better performance and faster response.
Mobile first – Since almost all buy were done on the phone, the mobile checkout flow was the easiest and most simplified.
A User was never required to change their behavior- All of it was transparent.
The Results
In fact, after just one month of using the platform, the results had been staggering:
The checkout success rate jumped from 72% to 96%.
The cart abandonment rate dropped significantly, creating new sources of revenue.
The startup was able to report an additional â‚ą15 lakhs each month in revenue.
Even more importantly, the level of trust customers had in the startup increased—shoppers felt confident that payments would “just work.”
