UX Audit: Paytm vs Google Pay vs PhonePe
Scan and pay flow design deconstruction.
👋 What's up, peeps? Dharmesh Ba here. Welcome to another edition of The India Notes, your go-to newsletter to decode Indian consumer psychology. Every week I publish a long-form piece decoding Indian behaviour from a digital lens.
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Mind-blowing! UPI records a whopping 36 crore transactions per day as quoted by RBI governor Shaktikanta Das. The market is ruled by PhonePe (50.1%), Google Pay (34.2%), and Paytm (10.8%), the big three in the game.
It's the new normal! I whip out my phone to pay, and the shopkeeper automatically directs me to the UPI QR code without a word. This could be the most significant behavioral change caused by digital intervention in my lifetime!
This week, I took on the challenge of deconstructing the scan and pay flow of the top three UPI apps. Don't be fooled by its simplicity; the apps have put some serious thought to create a seamless user experience. I'm in awe of how it works like a charm for someone in bustling Bangalore or a remote village in Bihar!"
[Desktop] Click the link below to view the interactive presentation 👇
[Mobile] Download the PDF version of the presentation
This is pretty great read.
Few other aspects of payments is the speed with which the payment is done and the failure rate.
I used to use Google Pay a lot and then have PhonePe as backup. I don't have Paytm then as they were pretty late to offer UPI. After a specific update from Google pay, the payments used to be very slow and because of that, I moved to PhonePe as they are very fast and very less failure rates. I also like the PhonePe history section where we can filter by Month, Payment status etc. and clearly mention bank account used to do the transaction.
And the Google Pay is so clumpsy with all the users that I have done payments display right on home page without any option to collapse. They may just display last 10 users.
Heard from few folks that Paytm is pretty quick and I started using it from a month and man, it's so fast. Now, I mostly use Paytm. Now, they have UPI Lite as well which makes payments every quick. I feel little distracted with Paytm app as they have a lot of things to offer. I just try to ignore all that and just do UPI transactions.
All this is great and all . But I don’t open these apps to make upi payments. I just use the widget to do it .
Paytm is the only app that supports ios widget so obviously it’s the go to choice for me .
Phone pe and Gpay I think had widgets in android but not ios .
Just one feature was enough for me to switch to Paytm from phone pe even though phone pe is little faster I think .
But that widget just saves a lot of time along with Face ID