A first-hand report from the war room - How PayU is coping with massive processing of festive sale transactions: three-party payment licences in India

The Indian festive season sales have become the highlight of every business' agenda and a barometer of consumer sentiment. Here's an interesting statistic to illustrate the magnitude of the season - in the first four days of the festive season, Indian e-commerce platforms reached $2.7 billion in GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) alone! As the preferred partner for most large merchants, PayU is in a war footing to welcome the season. Following PayU's core values, cross-team collaboration made the festive selling season a huge success for our merchants. We put our merchants at the heart of our process to ensure they experience a trouble-free and successful selling period. This year, we also achieved several accomplishments. In the 2021 online holiday sales, PayU:

- Set a new record of over 8 million transactions in a single day!

- Compared to the previous month, the volume of transactions increased by 70%.

- Average consumer spending increased by 521 TP3T over the 2020 holiday season.

Firstly, why is the war room model needed?

This holiday season was unique because of several factors. There was a huge backlog of demand on online channels and many large merchants moved their sales up by 10 days. What's more, some e-commerce companies decided to run large sales at the same time.

Typically, there are multiple risks associated with the online shopping process - complicated checkout processes, user redirection, payment integration issues, and more. This can lead to one of the most feared outcomes for e-commerce merchants - shopping cart abandonment. During peak holiday shopping frenzies, the risks are doubled.

Even a mere 21 TP3T drop in transaction success rate would result in an opportunity loss of crores of rupees. A two-minute system downtime can affect millions of customers. Therefore, our preparations start a month in advance to ensure smooth and trouble-free transactions during peak hours.

What is the secret of PayU's success?

All hands on deck: Managing over a month's worth of peak festival traffic requires seamless collaboration and synergy. The entire senior leadership, including Manas Mishra, Shantanu Preetam, myself and other business heads, worked with the engineers to resolve critical issues in the sales process and ensure smooth operations.

War Rooms and Green Lanes: We have 24/7 war rooms for all key merchants at PayU to deal with any special situations that may arise. We have a dedicated Green Channel team and over 100 engineers on standby 24/7 to deal with sales spikes.

Leveraging Wibmo's competitive advantage: With Wibmo, PayU's payment technology company, we used the network to bring together all the financial institutions and large banks that participated in the first round of sales.PayU conducted multiple load tests with them to ensure that the platform was able to consistently process up to 2,800 transactions per second.

Details make all the difference, and monitoring at the micro level is crucial: transactions can drop suddenly, and we are constantly providing real-time feedback to merchants so they can capitalise on sales opportunities. Even if we lose five minutes, it could mean a loss of sales worth Rs 5 crore for the merchant.

Our ability to innovate, technological readiness and preventive assessments ensure that we set the bar high when it comes to customer experience. There are very few fintech companies in India that can do this and PayU has managed to lead this success on a massive scale every year.

The real power lies in collaboration. Whether it was the corporate team, the product team, the engineering team, or the non-financial team, everyone responded positively to the increased workload. When the war room closed, we successfully processed more transactions than last year and the total value even reached 3,00% in 2020 on the peak day.