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How to make a groupon like site successful in a country where online wallets are nascent?

I am working on a Groupon like site in Pakistan. In order to make it successful, I need a payment system that people will use to prepay for the deal. The payment systems in the market are very nascent and require more time to get mature. I have two choices,

  1. Partner with a payment systems and use their service for the payments.
  2. Create my own payment system and integrate it with the app.

Which selection should I go for?

Answer 12904

When it comes to payments, don’t roll your own. Ever. It’s way too easy to get something wrong in the process and get screwed 10 times over. Use a battle-tested solution. And choose wisely: extensively test the solution before deploying it.

Personal anecdote: at one point I was selling a digital product using a pre-built shopping cart that I adapted as a plugin on WordPress. It turned out it accepted decimal values as units and, sure enough, a user eventually became curious enough to pass “0.1” as quantity.

Answer 12913

I would suggest you go with ready payment gateway which supports payments from Pakistan.

A full-stack payment gateway will cost you a couple of $100,000s at least to build. Also, you need to contact an acquiring bank and make a lot of paper stuff.

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