Online shopping platforms allow for multiple types of payment options like credit cards, debit cards, online banking, UPI, and wallets. However, not sure how many people have noticed that there’s one glaring opportunity that is being missed out, which is completely in the control of these online shopping platforms.
The idea is to allow for multiple payment sources to be used towards making a single purchase.
This option should be enabled in a way that I can split an INR 50K purchase into exact amounts that I want billed to each payment source – and if it means spending INR 17K from a Credit Card, INR 13K from a Debit Card, INR 10K via online banking, INR 7K via UPI and INR 3K via a wallet, the platform should allow that.
Doing so will allow for a few distinct advantages for all parties involved –
- shoppers will be able to use multiple cards to maximize their rewards/cashback (especially during sale seasons)
- the payment instrument providers (banks, fintechs) with the best offers will see a slow but steady uptick in their customer base (e.g. people will not have choose to get one credit card over another and hence will get multiple cards as they will always be able to use them all as/when needed). This way even the second-best/third-best cards get used instead of getting pipped to the post by the card with the best offer.
- online shopping platforms will see an increase in ticket size as well as an uptick in overall shopping spends since shoppers will now be able to leverage multiple payment options and maximize rewards