Shoppers Prefers Debit Cards For Online Transactions: Report

Shoppers on e-commerce sites still see debit cards as the most favorable payment method, as per a report from the FSS (Financial Software and Systems), a payment tech and transaction.

As per the FSS Payments Trend Report 2018, the FSS gateway had 589 million transactions reported via debit card in 2018, compared to the number of 201.4 million transactions via credit card. In the value department, credit cards reached over US$10 million while debit cards posted US$8 billion, which is a bit less than the value of credit cards.

According to FSS’s President of Software Products Business, Suresh Rajagopalan, the company only estimated digital merchant payments processed by its platform for the trend report; the results do not include person-to-person (P2P) payments. He added that the total transactions have been developing as well, thanks to the steady development in transactions via debit cards, which is a good sign.

And while cards are the primary player in the merchant payments, the company handled over 900 million transactions via the Unified Payments Interface in 2018, primarily P2P payments, as per Rajagopalan. For IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) and mobile banking transactions, another P2P mode, the figure could reach around 700 million.

FSS researched with nineteen major banks. As a result, FSS said that it processed over 59 percent of the total merchant payments on e-commerce sites. Visa led the share of transactions with 47.5 percent of card swipes, as per the report. Following Visa is Mastercard with 35 percent, and RuPay with below 16 percent. In the value department, Visa was ahead at 47.1 percent share in 2018.

In addition, the amount for credit cards transactions reached US$54.4 compared with US$13.4 for debit cards. According to Rajagopalan, the average debit card transaction size declined from 2018, which demonstrated that consumers preferred digital payments for even small online purchases, such as food delivery.

In the digital transactions department, mobile wallets grabbed the most share at 291 million, whereas the travel and hotel sector did at around 140 million. FSS said it had handled US$1.85 billion of transactions in October.