Indian Payment Gateways – No Recurring Billing Services Available

I was researching a recurring billing services business which needed to transact business in Indian Rupees. During research, I’ve come around to the finding that there are no Indian Payment Gateways (ie. CCAvenue) that provide recurring (subscription) billing services:

Which Indian Payment Gateway support Recurring Payment Mechanism to accept payments via Credit Card?
http://www.quora.com/Which-Indian-Payment-Gateway-support-Recurring-Payment-Mechanism-to-accept-payments-via-Credit-Card

Some other discussions regarding recurring billing services and Indian payment gateways:

http://blog.chargebee.com/payment-integration-options-for-startups-in-india/#sthash.snhYio3F.dpbs
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/headstart-network/QVdEwRLJbNw

Which is the best payment gateway in India?
http://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-payment-gateway-in-India

I stumbled upon this after researching a few of the Indian Payment Gateways (requirements for accepting Indian Rupees):

CC Avenue
http://www.ccavenue.com

EBS
http://www.ebs.in/

Zaakpay
https://www.zaakpay.com/

The 3 Indian PGs above will take Indian Rupees but can only process one-time charges. They also provide WooCommerce integration which I believe is best supported in this order: CC Avenue, Zaakpay, EBS.

I made it to the CC Avenue, EBS, and Zaakpay PGs both from your suggestion (CC Avenue) and my own research.

I had exhausted all attempts at sending the currency INR to PayPal. You can see the tests I’ve attempted on the current MyThinkBox website. PayPal will not execute the currency conversion once the payment is sent to them (like say you can process in the MXN peso). They simply do not support INR as currency:

PayPal Countries Matrix
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-approved-signup-countries-outside

PayPal Accepted Currencies (bottom of page)
http://docs.woothemes.com/document/paypal-extension-comparison/

At this point I think you can either accept only 1 time payments if you want the site to list and process in INR and go with an Indian INR (which has much higher fees) or you can sell in $USD, process subscription payments, and go with PayPal and just process through them.

Either that, or continue to search for a more creative startup that may have solved this problem (we could look into this ChargeBee service for instance):

http://www.chargebee.com/

With all that said, at the time of this posting there did not appear to be a viable method of taking recurring payment services for an online business in the foreign currency Indian Rupee.

Post written by Ed Reckers

Founder and lead web development consultant at Red Bridge Internet : San Francisco WordPress Developers and Consultants.

2 Responses to “Indian Payment Gateways – No Recurring Billing Services Available”

  1. Nisha Sahaay

    I think EBS payment gateway provides the same feature you are looking for. You can also visit this link https://www.ebs.in/IPS/features/customized-experience to know more on the same.

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