Recently, an article by Sanjay Goel (of MustSeeIndia, an Indian travel site) on Pluggd.in about Payment Processors in India sparked my interest. The discussion highlighted 2 prominent points for me:
- lack of awareness about existing Indian + global payment options amongst Indian businesses (entrepreneurs, technologists, startups). Some users even suggested that PayPal is illegal in India.
- few merchants discussed real features (that they should demand more of) offered by their payment provider; most (and rightfully so in the Indian context) were concerned with pricing and ease of integration.
I thought it would be great to introduce the key players in the online payments ecosystem (also called e-payments or web payments) so everyone understands the differences between a payment gateway, a payment processor and a 3rd party payment platform……..
As per Wikipedia, the term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.
A source of innovation becoming widely recognized, is end-user innovation. This is where an agent (person or company) develops an innovation for their own (personal or in-house) use because existing products do not meet their needs. This is very interesting, normal users unimpressed with off the shelf solutions create new products. An easy example that comes to mind – the Dyson vaccum cleaner. How many times have we all used some daily life product and thought “I could have designed this better myself”, but how many of us have turned our thoughts into actions?
At Stanford Professor Tse says “Users make a product innovative. If users cannot take an idea beyond what you originally thought they could use, then you probably do not have an innovation”. This means giving customers (and even your competitors) access to tools to create their own experiences and in the process creating a whole new ecosystem of value creators and value users. The Internet world is littered with examples of companies who have made millions by giving away their product [Google, Linux, Mozilla, Appstore]. Digital commerce works in counter-intuitive ways…………
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