Solving my issue with Google Pay’s payment process
🍿 How did it start?
I wanted to make a payment to a delivery executive for my food order. I tried using PhonePe but the payment failed and then I tried using Google Pay, the first time it said the payment was processing. This could have happened because of my poor internet connection or my bank could have been facing some downtime or anything else.
It took more than 5 mins, the delivery executive was waiting as well, I was extremely hangry and felt guilty for making the delivery executive wait for a long time. In order to quicken the payment, I made another attempt after waiting for some time, now my assumption was that the previous payment would get canceled. I made this assumption because it was taking a lot of time which usually does not happen with Google Pay.
WOOHOO! The second payment went through successfully, I happily ate my food and continued to binge-watch my Netflix show.
🤕 Here comes the difficult part, after a week I realized that the payment had been made twice. And now it was up to me and the delivery executive to solve this issue.
I was curious to see if this problem was faced by others,so, I googled it like every other person trying to find answers. This led me down the rabbit hole of youtube videos in various regional languages, articles from different websites on this problem- you know the usual. Just from the number of results that showed up, I saw that a lot of people faced this challenge, so, now I was more inclined to find the solution for this issue.
😶 Why didn’t GooglePay’s solution work for me?
Feedback on wait time — The absence of an indicator indicating the approximate wait time makes the whole process uncertain and the wait- extra painful.
Trust Factor — Google Pay is widely used to make financial transactions between friends, online, and offline merchants. According to Google Pay Help, the transaction which is being processed can either fail or succeed. I cannot possibly expect a random shop or a stranger to wait for three days for their payment to finally get to them; expecting them to take a gamble on my payment was futile.
👀 How did I try to solve it?
My solution could be difficult to solve technically but I had to think about what was right for the user. From my research, there are 3 steps when you transfer money 1. Starting Payment 2. Processing Payment 3. Money deposited to recipient’s bank.
⏰ I wanted to introduce a timer in the processing payment part. I used a 2 mins timer where two things can happen;
✔️ Payment is successful within two mins
❌ Payment can fail within the given time
Why this solution?
- The solution aims to equip the user to know the status of the transaction immediately, as opposed to waiting for a span of 3 days to know the status of the transaction. With the presence of immediate feedback, a user can decide their intent/action, rather than take a blind gamble.
- I also brought the Report Dispute CTA upfront so users don’t have to spend time searching for it, thus enabling it to act on it as soon as possible.
Thanks for reading and always remember to check the status of your transactions ;)
