In its quest to increase rather grim revenues from India, Facebook has today announced a new partnership with Indian payment gateway provider CitrusPay, to enable businesses to use the platform for transactions.
Currently, the company’s payment gateway allows Facebook users to make payments for games. Clicking on the purchase button on games opens up CitrusPay’s local gateway. According to some experts of fin-tech, this could be the first step to enable full-blown e-commerce within Facebook.
Facebook has already made it pretty clear that it is planning to turn its Facebook page features into shop type pages. It has already rolled out the feature to some of its partners internationally.
Earlier, Facebook transformed its messenger service into a platform and is also building fund transfer functionality into Facebook Messenger. While Facebook didn’t comment about this, Amrish Rau, MD, CitrusPay, said,
Social payments are increasing exponentially. More and more businesses are using social channels for business instead of dedicated e-commerce websites. We are keen to enable Indian consumers to buy directly from social posts on Facebook and Twitter.
We are seeing international e-commerce companies adopt local payment types like net banking so as to cater to the Indian banked population for payments.
This partnership of Facebook with CitrusPay will allow anyone with a bank account in India to transact on its website. Net banking is more economical for merchants as they do not have to pay the 2% fee to the credit card companies. Also, RBI’s regulations insist on localized payments where the underlying transactions are essentially taking place between two residents in India.
CitrusPay, a Mumbai based wallet company, recently announced that it has reached the gross merchandise value of $2.5 billion, thanks to its Citrus Shopping Festival held between 4th January 2016 to 6th January 2016.
The company further claimed that it has processed 1 million transactions and reached $30 million in cumulative deposits in individual wallet accounts. The company also added 1 million new wallet customers.
