Hello folks: after a brief hiatus, we are back with the TPF weekly AMA series! This week, we were glad to welcome Vishvak Saen, Principal Product Manager at Swiggy.

Vishvak is NIT Raipur graduate. He has been an ex-Product Manager at Tata 1mg, an ex- Senior Product Manager at MobiKwik. After MobiKwik, he had a stint at Trusting Social as a Senior Product Manager in 2018. He is now working as a Principal Product Manager at Swiggy. 

Products and Payments

The AMA had a lot of questions revolving around payments, pricing intangibles, offers and BNPL. 

Here is what Vishvak had to say about such questions:

Launching Payment feature

For launching a new payment integration in product a PM should have in mind the 

• The roll out plan

• Should be on a smaller scale and should be monitored closely.

• The visibility/ awareness plan and 

• This plan should kick in once the payment integration has been scaled 

• Promotional plan 

Pricing intangible benefits to products:

Vishvak suggested that intangible benefits require cultural support from product leaders. With that and team’s support a PM can ship features that provide better user experience while not moving numbers. 

How should payments evolve?

Assuming consumer brands, Vishvak shared the following steps for evolving payments.

• Seed - Business is just taking off.
• Situation - The founder puts up their Google Pay phone number and also has a template to share over WhatsApp. They annually reconcile these 100 transactions per day.
• Need - Any UPLAPP, bank.

• Series A - Business is improving.
• Situation - With 1000 transactions per day, they can no longer afford to UPI manually. Also, their users want cash and credit cards. Which will cost them 1%+ regularly, forever. So, they pay 18% GST + 1% cost now.
• Need - Get a razorpay link based payment solution. Or instamojo. 

• Series B -Business has started running 
• Situation - They now have 2500 transactions per day and it's costing them money. 5-10% users are dropping off without initiating payment. Only 75% of their payments go through.
• Need: An analyst who can make sense of numbers and construct the funnel and measure cost. 

• Series C - Business is growing
• Situation - 5000 transactions a day, and 10% orders lost in the payment page.
• Need: A multi PG solution like Justpay, Razorpay which gives services like Card vault, multi PG integration, routing controls, etc. 
• Team: 5 dev, 1 front end, 1 qa, 1 PM who is ready to learn payments.

• Series D - Business is booming
• Situation - 30,000 transactions a day. Systems are creaking. A payment failure might mean that the user went hungry/late/grumpy to bed. 
• Need: At least 85% of the users are able to pay at their first attempt. Not more than 0.65 MDR. 80% of refunds within 2 hours. Have cybersource, MPGS, Payu integrations. 

Evaluating new features for Payments:

Vishvak shared that to evaluate a new payment instrument for one’s marketplace is to first consider users’ loyalty. For example, young brands’ users require UPI because they are trust deficit. With established brands, users will pay through card even if UPI is unavailable. 

Overall approach 

• Why this instrument?
• Is this instrument cost tolerable?
• Will the business be fine without this instrument?

General offers vs Personally Curated offers:

Vishvak explained that the general mass offer should be used to bring the user in and the personalised one for specific outcomes after user knowledge. If the offers are broadcasted over TV etc, then easy to recognise coupon codes should be shared and once the user gets into the funnel, the product should reveal personalised coupons. The offers also depend on the price factor and purchase cycle of the product.

Average Order Value for Swiggy:

Average order value for Swiggy comes from 

• Understanding users better and suggesting new relevant food.
• Upselling contextually
• Allowing users to create gifting and bundling options.

Should BNPL be integrated?

Vishvak believes that there is no clear winner for BNPL in the market. In addition to simpl & lazypay, Amazon pay, paytm etc will enter the market. Once at least 10% users have an account with a BNPL player, it should be integrated.

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