E-payment: 'Shop from home' concept catching up

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 26 December 2003, 20:30 IST
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MUMBAI: Mumbai's Sneha Kulkarni was worried as to how she will send her monthly donation for 'chaturthi abhishek' to Siddhivinayak temple from the US where she had gone to visit her daughter. The temple's on-line system ensured that she could continue with her ritual from anywhere in the world. Seventy-year-old Amit Vyas got nightmares when he thought of going to book a ticket - the long distance and queue could further deteriorate his health. Thanks to online booking, he could do so at the click of a mouse. Welcome to a world where you can buy, and sell for that matter, literally anything sitting at home. What you need to have is a computer, Internet accessibility and credit card or online banking service. E-payment -- paying on Internet for goods or services you buy -- is a concept slowly but steadily catching up in India. A number of institutions and merchants have woken up to the idea of offering their goods/services online in a secure way. The Railways put up their own software in place for the online ticket booking facility but for smaller businessmen it involves high entry costs, integration of complicated software components, maintenance of huge hardware infrastructure And technical staff to handle it. It is here that the payment gateway companies step in. "What we do is marrying technology to business for the general profit," says Vivek Nayak, chief information officer of Avenues, a payment gateway company.