Ever wondered why you cannot pay your bills via Paypal for Indian websites ? Indian Railways IRCTC which is the biggest e-commerce site (as of date) in India does not even have paypal. It helps goes through the tedious process of filling out 4 forms and 4 redirections through sites for payments (yeah security ! what ever happened to the user experience and the pain points of users ? )
I figured out the root cause recently . Product websites including flipkart , infibeam# , camera websites like zoomin or pixetra do not allow payments via Paypal and some how ebay.in has PaisaPay which no one else in India could/would use. There was this particular Mac Software site which allows only payment through Paypal and I was trying to pay using Paypal. It errored me out saying that an Indian customer cannot pay to an Indian merchant because of the restrictions in India. Guess India does not want super well established companies to get into in India. ( Guess, the Reserve Bank/Govt laws want to start everything from scratch and go through the trouble which different companies in different places went through over the past few decades and start again at Day-1 ).
Side Note: What the Indian start ups really need is a payment gateway platform which does not suck and makes payments easy. ( Yeah, I am talking about ccavenue and ebs. YES, They do suck )
# Infibeam – I am not going to link them from my site or even for affiliates since they are the low lives who compared THE Kindle with a PI. Its like comparing a Micromax/Spice mobile phones with an iPhone or an Android. ( PI was namely an ebook reader which was branded on infibeam with an open source OS. These guys just licensed the software.) The site does not even sell ebooks for crying out loud. Total of 13 customer reviews tell me how famous the reader is. They are low on ethics (from what I feel). I could be abusing them, but freedom of speech is my right.
Sairam's Blog 