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Seems like RBI has made it so complex for PayPal to do business in India that it has gone crazy. All Indian merchants are facing the brunt of not being able to do business within India with PayPal and since the PAN card verification drive is going on, it has become impossible to do business with PayPal from anywhere. We have heard this from many merchants and have experienced this ourselves that PayPal keeps rejecting valid PAN card details and then put the account on a temporary hold where you are unable to receive any money.

If this was not enough, PayPal is auto withdrawing payment to bank accounts everyday. Which means that even if you get a payment of $2, this amount is sent to your bank next day resulting in loosing money with conversion and small payment transfer charges.

In this age where more and more companies are going online with ecommerce, it seems like RBI is encouraging monopoly by stopping multinational companies like PayPal to do a game changing business in India.

After PayPal being stopped in India for credit card payments, it took us 2 months to get CCAvenue to give us the ability to accept credit cards on SpeedHost. We are happy to say that we are now live with Indian CC transfers for both Visa and Mastercard.

UPDATE 30/08/2010: We now have ICICI in our debit card list.

We have had some of our customers complaint that they are not able to do transactions via Net Banking for ICICI bank… we checked this up with CCAvenue (Payment Gateway Provider) and found out that ICICI has decided to stop giving this facility to web hosting companies, now we don’t know what the reason is but it is very sad to know that they are being biased towards hosting providers. Not only this, CCAvenue failed to inform us merchants that this option has been taken out.

This puts a big question mark on the services provided by both ICICI and CCAvenue. We are not sure if and when ICICI will enable their services again but one thing is for sure, this is not the way online commerce will grow.

In the fast few days there have been numerous posts all over the net about payments being stopped and some being reversed for Indian customers. PayPal has also made an official statement in their blog about the same. In affect PayPal has stopped processing payments made to Indian accounts which are personal in nature. If you have a PayPal account which is verified as an Indian account, you could still get payments from your customers abroad, however they have to be made as Goods sold or Services rendered and cannot be done as personal.

This might just be another step in curbing money laundering, that is what i think. Last month PayPal stopped adding US bank accounts to customers with Indian address. I agree that this will put an end to lot of false accounts created for suspicious purposes but this will also affect a lot of genuine users and merchants. India is emerging as one of the biggest markets in the world and in the coming years it will also emerge as a leader in online transactions but if such hijacks continue on Indian payments the future will not look so good.

I am happy to announce that apart from offering PayPal / Credit Card and Net Banking facility for over 30 Indian banks for online payment we have added the facility for our customer to be able to pay via their Debit Cards for the banks listed below.

1. State Bank of India
2. Canara Bank
3. Citibank
4. Union Bank
5. Punjab National Bank

The biggest advantage of paying online is that your account is ready within 2 hours and you can start uploading your website and creating emails as apposed to paying via cheque which might take up to 5 days to clear and then your account is setup.

Note: We accept the payment via the payment gateway provided by CCAvenue which is 256bit SSL secure by VeriSign. So you do not need to worry about security issues. We do not keep any bank related information on our servers nor do we get to know about your bank information as the transaction is done by a secure third party.