Instamojo Blog

Welcome to Instamojo's Official blog where can help you in collecting payments instantly by sharing a link. Come, say hi or email us.

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Why A Simplified Payment Solution Is A Big Boost

When I started online retail in 2002, payment gateways were few and paying online using a card was rare. I remember ordering my college bag for Rs 199 on COD and using FabMart to order a Fanta bottle on Cheque-On-Delivery terms. You could imagine the kind of investment e-commerce players used to envision in the pre-payments revolution.

Given that I started my career with online retail, I am happy to see how players like Instamojo are innovating in this space. When Baazee.com came up with its payment gateway called PaisaPay, I remember being one of the first merchants to sign it by paying Rs 2500. Given I was below 18, I had my brother to sign the agreement on my behalf. In coming months, PaisaPay reduced its signup fees to Rs 100 and today it is free. It revolutionized online selling in India.

A lot of marketplace sellers across Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart made their beginnings on Baazee / eBay. Had eBay's PaisaPay not simplified payments collection for them back in early 2000s, these merchants would have never developed their business to sell online. PaisaPay brought a low upfront fee to begin selling online and attached itself to a marketplace that has millions of users. This laid the foundation for e-commerce In India. Today the average selling price of products has risen too. Phones like the Nokia Lumia 525 has sold in huge numbers at a price point of around Rs 10,000. This wouldn't be possible without a good payment system and trust build around the medium.

PaisaPay remains exclusive to eBay. But Instamojo is making inroads into the domain and democratizing online payments for all. Instamojo UX is crazy awesome for a payments company and you can get started in minutes with simplest on-boarding process to start selling & collect payments. Small businesses & startups can now have a payments solution that gives them best in class conversion ratio & user experience. For me Instamojo is ‘Simplifying Payments, Powerfully!’. All the best guys!

Guest post by Annkur Agarwal, Co-founder of Pricebaba.com.

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Instamojo helps Adister ease their payment processes

”I really thank Instamojo for their excellent service & intuitive user interface”- Shubham Agrawal, Co-Founder Adister

What does Adister do?

How did we come to know about Instamojo and was it a good fit for us?

Just when I was frustrated with current payment gateways, I posted a question in NextBigWhat and someone suggested Instamojo. As it turned out, we happened to make a very smart decision. 

Instamojo solved the most troubling section of our operation. No initial investment involved and easily understandable user interface and extremely good customer service. I really thank Ms. Neha Jha, for her assistance by attending our calls even in non-office hours.

How did Instamojo help us?

In our current edition we are manufacturing over 10,000 notebooks, to be manufactured by 3 differently-abled people hired by us. We ran an online crowd-sourcing campaign, which has raised a total sum of INR 77,000. Our target for the campaign is INR 300,000. Contribute for the campaign here.

Instamojo helped in easing the process and with each contribution, we were more motivated to reach our target. 

What should Instamojo improve upon?

We actually did not face any problem using Instamojo. The interface is perfectly fine, easy to use, with excellent features like “Pay what you want” but I feel Instamojo must have an add-on feature of automated mailing on any transaction.

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Instamojo Registration Process

At Instamojo, we believe in keeping our registration process simple and intuitive for our users. 

Please follow the following steps to register and setup your account on Instamojo 

Click on the sign up button and you will find the following dialog box appear 

Choose a username and password for your Instamojo account and enter your email id and phone number. If you are a business or an online brand, preferably use your brand/business name as username

We will send you a verification email on the email id you just mentioned. Kindly click on the verification link and verify your email address to proceed further. 

Ola! you have now completed your registration. 

Happy Transacting with Instamojo !

If you are stuck or need to speak to us at any point, call us on 02240044008

-Ruchir Kanakia

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Introducing Physical Goods

We had been flurried with requests by you for collecting payments for physical goods on our platform. Up until now, you could do it with some hacks and it was not very convenient. We thank you for bearing with us until we could build this feature.

You can now collect payments for your physical goods on Instamojo by just choosing "Create a Link" and then selecting the option to sell Physical Goods. 

Everything else is just as simple and as wonderful as you have come to expect from us. This is just the start, we are coming up with more stuff that eases selling such goods for you. Watch this space!

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My first day @ Instamojo

After 15 days in Sikkim, I was back to civilisation and was all excited to start working @ Instamojo

I was anxious about my first day at work. I had that feeling in my stomach which was trying to unsettle me. I woke up at 8 am and was all set to leave for office by 9:30. But to my dismay I ended up boarding a wrong bus which ensured that I reached office only by 11 am.

After settling down, I got my email account setup along with some of the other services which I may need, to do my work on a daily basis and slowly in no time the office was buzzing with the Monday morning nuances. 

I started exploring the product and was trying to spend time with each team member to understand what they do. The product is quite intuitive and simple.

Instamojo is a payment platform which enables people to accept payments by providing a link which they can use on Facebook, Twitter or on their websites. You can accept online payment for goods sold or services rendered with out any hassle or need to setup. 

Simple is what I guess defines what we do at Instamojo. We don't like complicated. 

It was almost lunch time and we went out to eat some dosas and watermelon juice and were discussing work during our lunch time. I then went through the entire support forum trying to understand the product better and then moved on to support tickets to understand what issues customers face on a daily basis. 

It was time for the evening chai and I must say we get nice chai just around the corner of our office building. After the chai break we again got back to work and I began discussing what I will be doing the next day. 

I am all excited and want to settle down as fast as possible. Work seems fun here and I hope it stays that way....... 

-  Ruchir Kanakia

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Now Email All Your Customers in 1-Click

In one of our recent updates, we introduced the resolution center, which made it simpler for your buyers to contact you post a transaction with any feedback or concern which they had.

Now, we have another update that will definitely excite you. As you already know that we gave you the functionality to send emails to your buyers from Instamojo dashboard itself. However, you had to send emails to them individually. Now with this update, you can send emails to some or all of your customers at the same time - with additional filtering conditions.

Q. How can this be used?

Ans: It can be used to upsell or cross-sell. You can intimate your customers about new products that you're offering. You can also send them additional note about an upgrade or information related to their purchase too.

Q. What points should I bear in mind while using this functionality?

Ans: Instamojo has been, and will always be very strict about "no-spam" policy. As such, you should be careful about how you use this feature and ensure that it is something that your customers need and will appreciate.

Q. How can I get this feature?

Ans: By default, this won't be active for all users. If you need it, just send us an email at [email protected] and we will activate it for you. 

Note: this feature is in trial mode right now.

UPDATE (dated: March 13, 2014) - now send file attachments too. 

As always, do send us your feedback on the same; we love hearing from you.

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Introducing Dispute Resolution Center

Instamojo has always helped you sell directly to your audience and collect payments instantly. While there is always direct conversation between you and your buyers but we felt a big gap as you grew and started having lots of buyers.

We realized that a platform that enables this communication would fill the gap. As a result, we are going live with our 'Resolution Center'.

Below is a preview of how it shows up in your Instamojo dashboard.

"Resolution Center" gives your buyers a simple way to reach out to you for any post purchase queries, clarifications or if there are any issues.

Here are all the possible reasons that your buyers would want to get in touch with you.

It also helps you as a seller have a single platform to cater to your buyers instead of responding to a lot of queries over emails, phone, SMS etc.

Doesn't that sound great? There's even more coming your way soon!

If you have additional queries, do visit our knowledge page. And as always, do provide us more feedback at [email protected] to make it better.

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How Instamojo helped us go Live in Half A Day!

Instamojo has always been looking to help other startups and help grow the ecosystem. One such opportunity was enabling Pracly sell their services. Pracly is a platform where startups can seek advice from experienced entrepreneurs and domain experts on any business problem over a call. This is what Ritesh, the Co-founder of Pracly had to say about us --

For a startup, it’s vital to get out there and get all the relevant information rather than building the entire product based on assumptions. We, at Pracly, followed the lean way and began talking to people with just a landing page. Fortunately, we realized that our potential customers could see value in our service – connecting entrepreneurs to experts for business advice. Instead of building the entire platform firsthand, we launched a basic version initially and added features based on feedback.

Sometime into our endeavor, we realized that true validation of our idea could only happen once users were willing to pay for our services, and honestly speaking it wasn’t a very happy realization. With this came the hassle of integrating an entire payment gateway, of which no one in the team had prior experience. Sure, with tons of e-commerce sites coming up, people are doing it, but it eats into the time and bandwidth of a small team to learn and implement it. It spells considerable delay in market validation.

We had a chat with Akash from Instamojo during a Hackathon and learnt how one could possibly sell anything on Instamojo. And when we did actually check it out, we realized that we don't have to do anything – it’s all there! We could charge for our services through Instamojo, completely customize it and also re-direct the user back to our website after the payment. All we had to do is create tickets on Instamojo and link it to our website. Voila! More than two weeks of work reduced to just half a day. Such is the power of the platform!

Platforms such as Instamojo make the life of new entrepreneurs easier than it was before and provide us the much needed support at different stages in our startup journey. We have used the services of American Tech giants, but using the services of an Indian startup in building our platform also gave us a sense of trust in our ecosystem.

'It’s the (Insta) Mojo Rising!'

-Ritesh  Pracly

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Social Pay — Pay with a Tweet or Facebook Post

Instamojo is known to help you sell and make money online in the easiest & quickest way possible. We have been consistently building tools & features like variants, discount code, "pay what you want" payment option, custom fields, PDF stamping, advanced analytics & many more nifty options to help you do just that keeping simplicity in mind. 

"Social Pay" is a new kind of payment system that doesn't need your buyer to transact with their cards or online banking options. Your customers pay you with their social network clout i.e. they receive your offering once they share it with their friends, fans and followers on Twitter or Facebook.

So now instead of creating free offers, you could ask your customer to pay with a tweet or a Facebook post. Think about what it could mean — for every person who does that, you have an ever increasing audience & reach. You could go viral! It just takes one click to use Social Pay (yes we make things that simple) :)

Q. How to start using "Social Pay"?

Ans: While creating an offer, click the checkbox (like the screenshot below) -- and that's it.

Q. How will my customers see it?

Ans: Your customer will see like this in your offer checkout page (screenshot below):

1. They choose the tab (either 'pay through twitter' or 'pay through facebook post')

2. Enter basic details.

3. Edit the content of the tweet or post.

4. Tweet or Post - Done.

Q. Is using "Social Pay" mandatory?

Ans: As always, we keep things flexible for you -- so "social pay" is optional. 

Protip: You can combine Social Pay with 'Pay What You Want' to give Social Pay as an alternative to monetary payments - so they can pay in kind or cash.

Do let us know what use-case would you like to explore with "Social Pay" option. We are excited to hear more from you and keep improving Instamojo. Give a shout-out at [email protected]

To test it out, here one example: https://www.instamojo.com/sampad/

Learn more about "Social Pay" in our knowledge base.

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Launching Variants -- Add Multiple Prices Per Offer

We built Instamojo to be the most flexible yet powerful e-commerce solution that helps you to sell digital products, event tickets, membership & more directly to your audience over social, mobile or web through just a link. And we have always kept in mind that we don't want you to worry about complexity or fuss at all while doing that.

So far, we are proud that we have been able to create a simple upload, add details and share a link framework to enable e-commerce for thousands of sellers.

While at it, we keep getting lot of feedback on how we can make it easier, better and more intuitive to sell online directly. 

As always, it's as simple as adding details of the variants to each of your offer and publish. That's it. Your buyers can view the variants at the checkout page with new prices. See the screenshots below:

Screenshot 1 on how to add variants:

Screenshot 2 on how your buyers view variants during checkout:

Side-by-side screenshot of both seller & buyer view:

Variants as a feature can be used in a lot of interesting ways like,

For Digital Products:

Use variants to introduce multiple prices for different license packages of your software or price different file versions of your eBook or music files.

For Event Tickets:

Use variants to price your guests, early bird or various other combination of prices to suit your needs.

For Memberships:

Use variants to differently price memberships like 1-month plan, 3-months or 6-months plan. 

Do let us know what's your use-case. Also reach out to us at [email protected] if you need any help regarding the same or have any suggestion or feedback in general.

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Introducing Custom Fields

We have been working tirelessly to make Instamojo more flexible and powerful to help you sell your wares online easily without complexities or unnecessary fuss. On that, we have released host of features in the past like analytics, discounts, pay what you want etc.

With "custom fields", now you should be able to collect more information from your customers. These fields will be part of the checkout form along with already existing name, email and phone-number fields which are already included in the checkout form.

To add custom fields, just click "custom field" for each offer; either from your dashboard or respective offer pages. Screenshot below:

Below screenshot will help you understand how you can add custom fields to each checkout form and thus prompting customers to add them while checkout.

After a successful sale, you would receive all the text entered in the custom fields in your sale receipt for your future reference.

A lot of interesting features are on their way which would make Instamojo much more flexible and powerful to you. Do let me know your feedback as always.

[instamojoblog]

Improve Your Offer Landing Pages' SEO in 1-click

Instamojo's mission has been to make it really easy to sell directly to your audience by promoting a link (a.k.a. imojo.in) via email, social networks, blogs, websites etc. 

Moving along, we have made it further simple to do the same and sell across devices and platform. So now you can seamlessly sell across social, mobile & web.

However, we do understand that you (sellers) want to increase their customer (buyers) base.

So far, you have loved how incredibly simple it is to start selling with Instamojo but we do understand the need to increase reach outside one's network and sell more.

For that, all you have to do is add few details about your offering under the "SEO options" and in a single-click, you are giving your offering an added opportunity to be discovered by thousands, if not millions more to find you through search engines like Google etc.

Below is the screen capture which would help you understand how to go about it:

And that's about it. As always, we want to hide the complexity of software and give you the benefit of simplicity to gain maximum mileage.

Do let me know what do you think about it or email us at [email protected]. Or you can tweet about it giving us a thumbs-up.

[instamojoblog]

Seller Success Stories: How TASI Sells Memberships Online

As part of seller success stories, we have TASI (The Animation Society of India) today — TASI is a non-profit organization with an aim to educate the emerging generation at large about Animation while providing a platform for exchange of creative & technical information within the existing art & animation fraternity.

Q. What do you do?

TASI: The Animation Society of India (TASI) is a not-for-profit, voluntary body comprising of various people from the Indian animation industry who have come together for the benefit of the community and the artists. We have members from all across India (students and professionals) who take either annual or life memberships. TASI conducts regular workshops and seminars across India and has an annual international animation festival in Mumbai every year called Anifest India.  

Q. How did you come to know of Instamojo, and was it a good fit?

TASI: I had heard about Instamojo through Twitter and a few friends who had used your services to sell either their digital comics or music. At TASI, we were on the lookout for a quick and hassle-free system to be able to sell our online TASI membership registration.

Instamojo was the perfect answer to our problem - there was no initial investment involved, the interface is very user-friendly and the entire 'setup - test - go live' process happened within a couple of hours.  

Q. What worked well for you while using Instamojo?

TASI: At TASI, we are a bunch of volunteers who devote their time and efforts towards a good cause. We don't have full time employees to manage any of our activities or responsibilities. We therefore need to find good, reliable and efficient partners for everything we do - be it managing our website/social media accounts or the event logistics or even member registrations.Our Members are scattered all over the country and it is not possible for us to have offices everywhere. Earlier members would have to courier a cheque to us or deposit it into our bank account and then wait for days to get their membership confirmed after the cheque was cleared. It was irksome for us to monitor all the payments and new members. 

With Instamojo, it became possible for prospective members to pay and sign up online and get their membership activated immediately.We get instant alerts when a new person pays and the detailed dashboard let's us verify information whenever we want. It gave a big boost to us in terms of members signing up because the process was now convenient for them as well as us.

Q. What should we improve upon?

TASI: The Instamojo interface is really user-friendly and the account is very easy to set up. Your current options suit most of your customers, but we have a few specific needs. Sure we appreciate what you already have but it would help us A LOT if you could add a few features (if possible):

1. The export csv file should have more customer data.

2. An option to add more fields in the "buy form" to capture additional details.

We are already on top of these and expect features rolled-out soon enough.

More so, if you are also looking forward to sell memberships online, do reach out to us [email protected] or tweet us.

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Introducing Discounts

Today we are very excited to introduce "Discounts". Discount offers have always been one of the most sought after feature in Instamojo.

CREATE DISCOUNT URLs:

CREATE DISCOUNT CODES:

You can create as many discount codes for your product, and use them for various reasons like

boost sales by running a discount scheme for your product(s).

incentivize purchase in some cases like early bird, pre booking or other offers.

have loyalty benefits by giving discounts to existing customers.

Q. How can I get started on creating discounts? 

Ans: You can start creating discounts by clicking on "discount code" option on your offer page or from your dashboard page.

Q. Does this mean that everyone will come to know that I'm giving out discounts?

Ans: Absolutely not! We give you the option to make them public or private. What that means is that in case of publicly visible discounted offers, all users will see a field for discount code on your product page. But in case of privately visible ones, there will be no such field and they can avail the discount only using the link that you share with them. 

To know more about discounts and how you can use them, visit our support page -- http://support.instamojo.com/solution/categories/123474/folders/261638

As always, reach out to us any time and help us spread the Mojo!

[instamojoblog]

Seller Success Stories: How Deepak Kanakaraju Sells Online Training Programs

As part of seller success stories, we have Deepak Kanakaraju today -- he's a digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. He is also an author, speaker and trainer in the field of digital marketing. He blogs about digital marketing tips at DigitalDeepak.com. Recently, he wrote a few kind words about us too.

Q. What is the story behind your products?

Deepak: We sell study materials online for a particular exam related to joining the Indian armed forces. It was a very difficult task for us to collect online payments. We contacted some big name Indian payment gateways and they were asking for big setup fees and the charge per transaction was also high. We finally resorted to sending physical shipments of the educational materials via cash on delivery model which was cumbersome and there were a lot of missed shipments and bounce backs.

Q. What made you choose Instamojo and how did Instamojo help?

Deepak: Instamojo was referred to me by a friend and for me Instamojo is God send. I was almost thinking about closing the project because I couldn't handle the payments and logistics all by myself. For a small business like me who doesn't have a corporate office and a team of people waiting for orders, you would agree that it is no easy task to manage payments and deliveries. With Instamojo, everything is now automated at a fraction of the cost.

Q. What's the best aspect of using Instamojo?

Deepak: Simplicity and 5% transaction fee is competitive.

Q. How can Instamojo improve and support you better?

Deepak: So far its great but there will be more competitors in the market because the demand is high. As long as Instamojo keeps listening to the customers and keeps introducing new features without adding complexity to the whole process, Instamojo is sure to dominate the market.

If you are also thinking to sell training courses or similar like online tutorials, do reach out to us [email protected] or tweet us.

[instamojoblog]

"Instamping" - PDF Stamping Feature to Personalize Your Ebooks

At Instamojo, we spend a lot of time understanding your needs and requirements which helps us create a better product that you can use daily to sell directly to your audience through a link from virtually anywhere. 

Also, we always hide the complexity while exposing the simplicity of a tool/feature so that you can easily benefit from it.

How does it work?

Instamping lets you stamp your PDF files with the buyer’s information at the time of sale automatically.

With each page having buyer’s information stamped, greatly discourages sharing and posting of copyrighted content. 

With the growing demand of digital book, publishers get increasingly confronted with the issue of online piracy. Even though there are terms & condition that alerts the users implication of distribution, but one cannot be tracked if this gets uploaded in a torrent or a free share website.

This feature will make the user responsible to own the content, and even if re-distribution happens, the user can be tracked down.

This feature is extremely useful to those writers, designers, developers etc who create things for a wider audience, and we want to make sure the effort doesn't go in vain.

How to get started?

You will simply need to log to Instamojo, upload your PDFs you want to sell. And then, just check the "Secure your PDF" (see screenshot above) option after uploading the file. Doing this will ensure that the user’s email id (by default) is stamped in the PDF file's footer.

For further information, visit our support center.

Is this feature chargeable/mandatory?

Absolutely Not. We have made this feature available for all and have kept it simple and flexible.

Here what one of our beta-users has to say –

“It fast, simple and all it needs is 1-click. And that's it. This feature allowed us to relax the pricing and thus reach a wider audience. We knew our content was unique and receive a good user response, but we observed this was getting shared over torrent. Eventually we didn’t take the risk this time and have started to get higher volumes due to better price."

So you already got an eBook and want to get started with Instamojo. Click here to upload one now and do let us know your feedback.

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Seller Success Stories : How Apurva Chaudhary Monetizes Her Newsletter

Quite often, we see our users use Instamojo in ingenious new ways. So from time to time, we publish their success stories here to inspire others.

We caught up with her and did a short Q&A about her monetization strategy she used for DMN:

1. What motivated you to create DMN newsletter?

Apurva: I love to travel and contributing to MediaNama meant I had to stay up to date all the time. Then, I realized that there's no option like Techememe.com in India that highlights important news in digital media & tech that I could skim through during my travels. So I thought I'll create one myself. That's when I came across Jason's newsletter @launch. He was hiring researchers that time. I sent him an email asking if I could contribute India related news that he could sent out during our time zone. I even sent him tweets, but he never replied. Hence I started with DMN. A newsletter that provides news in brief is a perfect catching up you need to do when on a Vacation. Once I started the newsletter, I realized that VCs and Industry leaders were among the ones who subscribed. I am guessing they don't have much time go through each and every startup blogs out there.

2. What made you choose Instamojo?

Apurva: When you guys launched Instamojo I kept thinking of what I could give away. If you know me, I am really a simple living kind of a person with not much to sell or give away. That was until I launched my newsletter and wanted to monetize it. I DM’ed Sengupta on whether I could use Instamojo to let others support my newsletter. At that time it didn’t allow users to do that. Only sell. Sengupta, instead called me and found a way to do it on the same day. The next day, I sent out a newsletter asking others to support my work.

3. How has Instamojo helped you monetize your newsletter?

Apurva: When I started DMN I wasn't hoping to monetize it. I wanted to keep it as a hobby, however, it took me lots of time to write the newsletter. I would start at 18:30pm to write the newsletter and would sometimes send it out at 20:30PM. In fact, when I sent out a newsletter asking others to support my newsletter, I honestly wasn't expecting much but the response overwhelmed me. Almost every regular reader supported. It has motivated me to keep going. 

4. Are there any tips or suggestions you would like to give other bloggers or content creators?

Apurva: I am still experimenting. However, there's one thing I would like to say is build/write something which you want to use/read. If you want it, certainly somewhere someone else is looking for it too.

5. Is there any special trick that helped along with way that you would like to share?

Apurva: When it comes to content: Be honest and always ask yourself whether you would like to read what you've written. Are you providing any value add?

6. What is the best feature that Instamojo has provided you?

Apurva: It has be Pay What You Want feature. Earlier, people would ask me whether they could contribute more, however, the only option was to ask them to contribute twice or thrice, which is asking for too much efforts from them. With flexible payment, my readers are supporting generously. Just last week Vijay Shekhar Sharma of One97 donated generously. I am a happy soul :)

7. What can Instamojo do better to help you in your journey?

Apurva: I am not sure if you're already providing it (I couldn't find it), but a support or buy using Instamojo button that I can embed on my newsletter or blog would be helpful.

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Now if you're also thinking something similar and want a helping hand, do reach out to us at [email protected] or tweet us.