Every hour a business owner in some part of this vast country is using the digital mode of payment collection and tracking, to keep their customers happy and the business booming. We imagined how a day in the life of these business owners using various digital payment collection and tracking modes (available with Razorpay) would look like.
(Note: The stories have been crafted based on data on how we see our customer segments use our digital payment solutions to help their consumers.)
7 am: On a rainy day in Mumbai, a busy tea seller is serving piping hot cups of tea. Rain or Sun, a cup of his famous chai with bun-maska is just the right note to start the day. And there’s no need for rain-soaked cash now. Payment links he can generate on the go makes it easy to pay on the go as well.
9 am: In his home overlooking a fast-vanishing lake in Bangalore, an entrepreneur is crouching in front of his computer. It’s been a good month. More students are signing up for their online classes. He needs to know just how good it has been in terms of payments. A click on his payments dashboard shows him all the numbers for the month and the comparison from the previous month. Payments settled, he gets ready to start the new day.
11 am: Miles away, in Ahmedabad, the owner of a healthcare diagnostics firm is fielding calls from their testing centre partners across the country. Their diagnostics and doctor consultation services for elderly citizens are now more needed than ever. But she can’t do it alone. She needs partners in multiple locations to manage the local testing. She has been facing a significant challenge in managing the collections across the centres. Thankfully, today, she has found a solution, with an automated payment collection system. Maybe time to onboard the next set of partners, she wonders.
1 p.m. A small restaurant owner in Coimbatore is looking at the wall clock. Lunchtime. A year ago, his biriyani was the talk of the town and people would line up to have their fill. Now, he wonders how many will make the effort to come all the way to his shop. But, there, he sees his first customer. With the flavours of the biriyani now packed up in an easy to carry box, the customer takes out his wallet. The owner points at his customized QR code. A phone is all the customer needs to make a safe and easy payment.
3 pm: “I could write a story on how people are moving across the cities during the pandemic.” A furniture rental owner thinks to himself. Study tables, beds, television, his team has set up many homes and many dreams over the last year. But for many, the homes are temporary. And with offices not yet opening up, some might prefer to be back in their hometowns.
Which means, processing refunds. A messy job, on the best of days. But, a critical part of his work. He knows many will come back and will again return to their easy to install furniture. He uses the refunds feature on his payment platform to manage the process.
5 pm: “There, all done, now, I think.” A yoga instructor glances through her new yoga teaching website. It has her videos, her short write-ups on yoga lessons from history, a few healthy recipes she whips up and finds her students clamouring for. Youtube had given her an audience and reach. Now, she finds more students wanting to join regular classes with her. The site is her new online home. She adds a payment button to her site. Now students can join the classes and also pay directly as well. All sorted, she gets ready to start her evening batch.
7 pm: From working with communities to distributing food and medicine to organizing oxygen cylinders during the peak of the 2nd wave of COVID-19, her non-profit organization had been working constantly, on-ground to bring some relief to those most impacted by the pandemic.
Now she sees a bigger need. Find some way to support livelihood options for those most marginalized. She knows just the right partners to scale the work. But mobilizing funds always took time. Now, she sets up her payment page online. She shares details of their past work. And snapshots of their plans. Voila, the first donation, just comes in within hours.
9 pm: Thriller, check. True Crime, check. Stellar casting, check. The OTT team sits back after releasing their latest new series. This one, they are sure, will pull in the audience.
The trailer is intriguing. The weekend is approaching. What they need is for people to choose the subscription options that work for them. For some, that’s yearly. Others need a monthly one to finish this series and a few more. Thankfully, their payment subscription plan helps them do just that. Let the movie begin.
Also read: Challenges faced by subscription businesses and how to overcome them
Midnight: An old lady opens the door to find her favourite flowers and a healthy carrot cake delivered specially for her. It’s her birthday the next day. There’s a handwritten note. It’s from her daughter, who lives in the US.
An ocean away, her daughter gets the parcel delivered message on her phone and gets ready to wish her mother. Thank God for the D2C brand whose custom made products she loves and which she wanted to share with her mother, can now accept international payments.
Across the country, business owners and their customers alike get ready to call it a day. ‘Digital Payments’ gets ready for the next 24 hours of stories that payments can tell.
