Arun Thomas has a classified website called Bikes4Sale.in where you can list and purchase used motorcycles in India. Arun uses Instamojo to collect payments online and we had a chance to interview him about his entrepreneurship journey.
Instamojo: What inspired you to start Bikes4Sale.in? Are their any other projects you are actively involved with?
Arun: We started in the year 2007. Got the idea when I was able to sell my brothers bike using Orkut (was popular at that time) and other online forums including our friends company intranet boards. The sale happened in 2 days and that too at a much higher price than normal market price.
There were not many good classifieds portal for motorcycles at that time and we saw a huge potential for the market. Even now there are not many dedicated motorcycle classifieds portals other than the crowded general classifieds sites. In 2008, we started Mobiles4Sale and its doing pretty good now.
What made you choose Instamojo and how are you using Instamojo for your work?
We have a Premium Selling feature wherein users have to pay a small fees to promote their bikes. We are using CCAvenue as the payment gateway. CCAvenue’s interface is pretty old and not at all user friendly. There were lot many questions to answer including shipping address which was not necessary when selling a service.
I was impressed with PayU’s payment flow. Contacted them. But I didn’t want to go through the long approval process and document submission one more time. Then I came to know about Instamojo! So I decided to give Instamojo a try and replaced ccAvenue in half of the payment pages.
Instamojo helped me to bypass all these payment gateway approval process. In short, we are using Instamojo as a Payment Gateway.
What is the best aspect of using Instamojo?
Simplicity. Approval process. Clean & minimalistic interface.
Is there any special trick or hack that you used that you would like to share for others to learn?
Instamojo is actually only for selling digital goods, event tickets, memberships etc. And I just wanted a clean payment system wherein the user will enter their payment information.
If I had given the url Instamojo provides (https://www.instamojo.com/karottechnologies/premium-selling/), the user will have to click on Get It Now button again. And there was that profile link at the top. All these are distractions for a user who has come just to make the payment.
I noticed that the Buy link in profile page (https://www.instamojo.com/karottechnologies/) had an extra url parameter (?intent=buy) which hides all these distractions and opens up the payment page directly!
This helped me to neatly integrate the payment system in https://www.bikes4sale.in/premium-selling.php
If that Powered by Instamojo logo was not there, normal users wont even know that its Instamojo powering the payment interface. 🙂
What can Instamojo do better to help you in your journey?
Would like to see some more features. I know more features will kill the simplicity you have. But having these will be useful for businesses like us:
- Option to customize the payment button like in PayPal. I would prefer Pay Now instead of Get It Now.
- Option to hide “Powered by Instamojo” since I don’t want our visitors to go somewhere else. (I know its too much to ask and no PG providers do this!)
- Decrease page load time. It would be good if you can do this. Hiding share this buttons and replacing instamojo image logo with text logo may help.
- Option to customize email ids in the pdf receipt sent to the buyer. Right now it gives bikes4sale.in@gmail.com for all our payment links. I would prefer something like billing@mobiles4sale.in or billing@bikes4sale.in
Instamojo: Thank You!
