How to Choose a Payment Gateway for Your Website in India: Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU and Stripe Compared

What does a payment gateway actually do for an Indian website?

When a customer taps Pay on your website, three separate things have to happen. The card, UPI or net banking details have to be captured securely. The customer's bank has to approve the payment. And the money has to travel to your own bank account, with your website told whether the payment worked. A payment gateway handles the first and the last, and in India it usually works together with a payment aggregator that holds the funds briefly and settles them to you.

That last point surprises many first-time sellers. Most small businesses do not open a merchant account directly with a bank. They sign up with a payment aggregator, which has its own agreements with banks and card networks, and the aggregator's gateway is the piece you connect to your website. In everyday speech people call the whole package a payment gateway, and this guide does the same, because that is the word customers and vendors use.

The money does not reach you at the moment of payment. The customer pays, the aggregator receives the funds, and settlement to your bank account follows on a schedule. How quickly, and what can delay it, is one of the most important differences between providers. A website owner who needs cash to buy stock next week cares about settlement far more than about a tenth of a percent in fees.

This guide is written for people who run or are about to build a website that takes payments in India: online stores, service businesses collecting advance payments, course sellers, clinics and small manufacturers. It explains how to compare Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, Stripe and similar providers without relying on a single table of rates that will be out of date by the time you read it. Where a figure changes often, we say so and tell you what to ask for instead.

How do Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU and Stripe differ?

All the well-known Indian gateways can take cards, UPI, net banking and wallets, and all publish developer documentation. The differences that matter to a small business are less about what they can do and more about how they treat a new merchant, how they settle and how they behave when something goes wrong.

Razorpay is widely used by Indian startups, online stores and software businesses, and is often the first name that agencies and plugin lists mention. Reviewers commonly praise its developer experience and its ready-made integrations. The recurring complaint is about account stability: merchants in some industries report holds or reviews that interrupt payouts, so it is worth reading its terms on reserve and review rights carefully.

Cashfree is often chosen by businesses that want fast payouts, marketplaces and brands that also need to pay vendors or customers. Some comparison articles mention promotional pricing on certain payment methods. Promotions change, so treat any such claim as a question to put to their sales team, not as a fixed rate.

PayU has a long history in India and wide payment-method and currency coverage. Merchants tend to mention a more involved onboarding process and, in some reviews, slower support. Integration availability also varies by platform and over time, so check that the plugin for your platform is current before you commit.

Stripe is known worldwide for its developer tools. In India, access for new businesses has been restricted at various points, and its settlement terms differ from the domestic gateways. If you plan to sell abroad as well, Stripe is worth asking about, but confirm whether your business can be onboarded today.

There are also other options, including bank-run gateways, PhonePe and Paytm business products, and Instamojo-style tools aimed at very small sellers. A bank-run gateway can suit a business that already has a strong current-account relationship. A simple payment-link product can suit a seller who takes a handful of orders a week and does not have a website checkout yet.

Be careful with comparison blogs, including ours. Many are written by or for vendors, and they copy each other's fee tables. The only dependable source for a price is the provider's own current pricing page and the written agreement you receive after onboarding.

• Razorpay: strong integrations and developer experience; read the account review and reserve terms.
• Cashfree: often picked for payout speed and marketplaces; ask which pricing is promotional.
• PayU: broad coverage and long history; check onboarding effort and plugin currency.
• Stripe: excellent tools; confirm current availability for new Indian merchants.

What should you compare before you choose?

Start with a short list of questions and ask every provider the same ones. Writing the answers in one table is the quickest way to see which provider fits, and it protects you from a salesperson who is good at conversation but vague on terms.

Will they approve your business? Some categories attract extra scrutiny or are not accepted at all, such as certain financial, health, travel, digital goods or high-refund businesses. If you sell something in a borderline category, ask before you spend days on integration.

Which payment methods do your customers use? For many Indian consumers UPI is the default. Cards, net banking, wallets, EMI and buy-now-pay-later matter more for higher-value purchases. If your average order is large, EMI and card options can raise conversion. If it is small, UPI and wallets may be enough.

How fast is settlement, and what can delay it? Ask for the standard settlement time in working days, whether settlement happens on weekends and holidays, whether faster settlement is available and what it costs, and what triggers a hold. Ask what happens to money when a dispute is open.

What is the full charge schedule? The headline rate is only one line. Ask for setup fees, annual or maintenance fees, per-transaction charges by payment method, charges for international cards, refund handling, chargeback fees and any minimum monthly amount. Ask whether GST is added on top, because it usually is.

How good is support? A gateway that cannot be reached when a payment is stuck costs you real money. Ask whether you get a named account manager, what the support hours are and how disputes are handled.

How well does it fit your platform? A gateway with a maintained, well-reviewed plugin for your platform saves time and risk. If you use a custom build, look at the API documentation, webhook reliability and the quality of the test environment.

What does the agreement allow them to do? Read the clauses on reserves, account holds, termination and notice. You do not need to be a lawyer to spot a clause that lets the provider withhold funds for a long period without explanation.

What do payment gateway fees really include?

Fee talk online is full of single numbers such as a flat percentage for all payments. In practice the charge depends on the payment method, the card type, whether the card is domestic or international and your agreed plan. A business with a high volume or a low-risk profile can sometimes negotiate better terms than the public rate card.

A useful way to think about cost is to work out the charge as a percentage of an order in your own business. Take your typical order value, apply the rate for the method most customers use, add GST on the fee and add any fixed per-transaction amount. Do this for UPI, for a domestic card and for an international card, because your blended cost depends on the mix of your customers.

Look for the charges that are easy to miss. Refunds may or may not return the original fee. Chargebacks usually carry a separate fee on top of the lost sale. Some providers charge for payouts, for faster settlement or for extra features such as subscriptions, payment links and invoicing. A cheap headline rate with expensive extras can end up costing more than a slightly higher flat rate with everything included.

Be wary of any provider that promises the lowest rate in the market without showing the agreement. Pricing in India has seen promotions and changes more than once, and a rate that was true in a blog post may no longer be on offer. Ask for the rate in writing, along with how long it is guaranteed.

We deliberately do not publish a fee table in this article. A table would look helpful and would mislead you within weeks. Instead, treat this section as your checklist when you request quotes, and keep the answers with your records.

What is happening with UPI charges?

UPI deserves its own section because it is the payment method many Indian customers prefer, and because the rules around merchant fees are in the news. Since 2020, the law has required zero merchant discount rate, or MDR, on UPI and RuPay debit card payments. That is why a UPI payment has felt free to most merchants.

In August 2026, the finance ministry said that user-to-user UPI transfers will remain free and that users paying merchants will not be charged, but that a nominal MDR may be introduced for a limited set of merchant transactions. It said any such charge would be threshold-based and not applied to everyone. The change depends on Parliament amending the relevant section of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, and the details were not settled at the time of writing.

Several news reports have mentioned specific figures, including a percentage for payments above a certain value and exemptions for small merchants. Those reports do not agree with each other on the start date or the thresholds, and the ministry did not confirm the numbers. We are not going to repeat them as fact. If you plan margins around free UPI, check the latest circulars from the government, the RBI and NPCI, and ask your gateway how it will pass on any change.

What does this mean for your website today? Two practical things. First, do not assume UPI will stay free for every order size forever, and keep your pricing flexible enough to absorb a small change. Second, never pass a payment-method surcharge to customers without checking the rules, because networks and regulators have their own limits on surcharging.

Card payments are different. The zero-MDR rule covers UPI and RuPay debit cards, not Visa or Mastercard cards or credit cards, so banks and gateways already charge fees on those.

What do RBI rules mean for a small online seller?

You do not need to memorise regulations to run a store, but a few rules shape how gateways treat you, so it helps to understand them in plain terms. The Reserve Bank of India regulates payment aggregators, and its framework has been updated, with consolidated directions issued in 2025. Details change, so read the RBI's own notifications for the authoritative text.

The first effect you will notice is KYC. Aggregators must know their merchants. Expect to provide your business PAN, proof of business registration if you have one, a bank account in the business's name and identity documents for the owner. Some aggregators ask for your website address and check that it shows what you say you sell. Summaries of the 2025 directions say small merchants below certain turnover thresholds can use a simpler process, but you should confirm how your chosen provider applies it.

The second effect is settlement. The RBI's earlier guidelines said that where an aggregator has no control over incoming funds it must pay merchants on a T+0 or T+1 basis after receiving them, and that settlement timelines can otherwise differ by merchant according to the agreement. In plain terms, the timeline depends on your contract, which is why you must ask for it.

The third effect is data security. The RBI's guidelines say neither aggregators nor their merchants may store customer card credentials, apart from limited data needed for tracking a transaction. For you, that means using the gateway's hosted checkout or secure fields, and never building your own form that sends card numbers to your server.

There is a fourth effect that people forget: refunds and disputes. The agreement you sign will say how long a refund takes, who bears the cost of a chargeback and what evidence you must provide. Read it before a dispute happens.

Finally, remember that tax and compliance sit outside the gateway. Whether you must register for GST, what invoice you must issue and how you report income depend on your business and turnover. Ask a chartered accountant, and do not treat the gateway's dashboard as a substitute for your books.

What do you need ready for KYC and onboarding?

Onboarding is where many new sellers lose a week. Providers differ, but the requirements below are common, and having them ready speeds things up. Rejections often come from small mismatches, not from anything dramatic.

Prepare your legal identity documents: the business or owner's PAN, an address proof and, depending on your structure, a certificate of incorporation, partnership deed or GST registration. Prepare a bank account in the same name as the business, and a cancelled cheque or statement for verification.

Prepare your website. Reviewers usually visit it. They look for a clear description of what you sell, real prices, contact details, and the policy pages that customers need: privacy policy, terms and conditions, refund and cancellation policy and shipping policy for physical goods. A site that is still a placeholder, or that has inconsistent business names, invites questions.

Make sure the business name, address and phone number on the website match your documents. Mismatched names between the PAN, the bank account and the website are a common reason for a request for more documents.

Describe your business model honestly. If you take advance payments, sell on subscription, run a marketplace or sell digital goods, say so in the application. Providers have different rules for each model, and a mismatch discovered later can lead to a hold.

Be ready for a short wait. Approvals can take from a day to a couple of weeks depending on the provider and the completeness of your documents. Do not schedule a launch campaign until the live keys are working and you have completed a real test payment.

• Business PAN, identity and address proof for the owners.
• Bank account in the business name, with proof.
• GST details if registered.
• A live website with real products, prices, contact details and policy pages.
• Names and addresses that match across documents and the site.

How do you match the gateway to your platform?

The best gateway on paper can be the wrong one if it does not fit how your website is built. The practical question is how payment will be connected, and who will maintain it.

If you use a hosted store builder, check which gateways it supports natively. Some platforms limit you to a short list, and some charge an extra platform fee if you use a gateway outside it. On Shopify, for example, the choice of an external gateway can bring extra transaction fees, so read our guide to Shopify pricing in India before you decide.

If you use WordPress with WooCommerce, you will rely on a plugin. A plugin that is maintained, recently updated and compatible with your WooCommerce version is worth more than one with a slightly better rate. Look at the date of the last update, the number of active installs and the support responses in the review section. Remember that a plugin can be withdrawn or fall behind, so have a plan if that happens.

If you have a custom website built with a framework such as Next.js or a Node or PHP back end, you will integrate through the gateway's API. Look for clear documentation, a test mode that behaves like live mode, webhooks that retry if your server is down and signature verification so that you can trust a payment message. Our payment gateway integration work follows this approach.

If you sell through a marketplace or ONDC as well as your own site, think about reconciliation. You will receive money from several sources on different schedules, and a clean way to match payouts to orders will save hours every month. See our guide to ONDC for small sellers if that applies to you.

Finally, think about growth. A store that takes ten orders a month and one that takes a thousand have different needs. If you expect to add subscriptions, international sales, split payments to vendors or in-app payments later, ask now whether the provider supports them, so you do not need to migrate under pressure.

How should you design the checkout so payments succeed?

Picking a gateway is half the job. The other half is making sure customers who want to pay can pay. Failed or abandoned payments are often caused by checkout design and technical details, not by the gateway itself.

Offer the methods your customers expect and put the most common one first. For many Indian audiences that means UPI at the top, with cards and net banking below. Do not bury UPI behind a long list, and do not ask customers to create an account before they pay. Guest checkout with a phone number and email is faster and converts better for most small stores.

Keep the page fast and stable on mobile. Many payments are completed on phones, often on slower connections, and redirects to bank pages can fail if the page loads slowly. Our guide to Core Web Vitals for small business sites covers the performance basics.

Handle the return from the payment app properly. A customer who pays through a UPI app and returns to your site needs to see a clear confirmation. If your site shows an error because the redirect was slow, the customer may pay again or contact you in a panic. Use webhooks to confirm payment server-side, not only the browser redirect.

Show the total cost early. Surprise delivery or tax charges at the last step are a leading cause of abandoned carts. State shipping and taxes before the payment page.

Make failure recoverable. If a payment fails, tell the customer why in plain words, keep their cart and let them try another method. A generic error message sends them away.

Add trust cues near the pay button: your business name, contact details, refund policy link and the gateway's security badge if it provides one. Do not invent badges or certifications you do not hold.

What should you test before you go live?

A payment flow that works once in test mode is not tested. The problems appear in the unhappy paths, and they are cheaper to find before customers arrive. Run through this list with the gateway's test credentials, then repeat a smaller version with live keys and a small real payment.

Test a successful payment with each method you offer, and check that the order status, confirmation email and stock level update correctly. Test a failed payment and a cancelled payment, and check that the order does not show as paid.

Test a timeout. Close the browser during payment and see what your system does when the confirmation arrives later through a webhook. A reliable setup marks the order as paid when the webhook arrives, even if the customer never returns to your site.

Test duplicate webhooks. Gateways may send the same notification more than once, and your system should ignore the repeat instead of creating two orders or sending two emails.

Test a refund, both full and partial, and check that the money and the order record agree. Check what the customer is told and when.

Test on a real phone with a real UPI app, not only on desktop. Test in at least two browsers and with a slower connection.

Check the reconciliation. After your first live day, match the gateway's report to your orders and to the money that arrives in your bank account. Differences point to fees, delays or errors you want to understand early.

Finally, record who to call. Keep the gateway's support contact, your account identifier and the escalation route in a shared note, so that anyone on your team can act if payments stop at night.

What mistakes do small sellers make with payment gateways?

Some mistakes repeat often enough to be worth listing. None of them is unusual, and each is avoidable.

Choosing only on the rate. A slightly lower percentage is a poor trade if settlement is slow, support is unreachable or the account is frozen during a busy month. Weigh reliability alongside price.

Applying before the website is ready. An unfinished site with missing policy pages and placeholder products often leads to rejection or a long back-and-forth. Finish the basics first.

Depending on a single gateway. If your only provider holds your account for review, your sales stop. Some businesses keep a second option configured, even if it carries a small share of traffic, so they can switch quickly.

Ignoring webhooks. Relying only on the browser redirect leads to paid orders that never reach you as paid, and to customers who are charged but see an error. Verify payments server-side.

Assuming GST and invoicing are handled. The gateway moves money. It does not file your returns or issue the correct tax invoice unless you configure that separately. Speak to your accountant about what you must issue.

Skipping reconciliation. Money arrives in batches, net of fees and refunds. If you do not reconcile weekly, small errors become a large mystery at year end.

Treating plugin installation as the end of the project. Plugins need updates, and checkout flows need monitoring. Set a reminder to review payments, failures and plugin versions every month.

How do you decide between the main options?

Use the following decision path as a starting point. It is not a rule, and your own quotes and test results should overrule it.

If you run a straightforward Indian online store and want a gateway with plenty of ready-made integrations and good documentation, begin with Razorpay and Cashfree. Request written terms from both, compare settlement and support, and run the same test orders on each in test mode.

If your business is a marketplace, pays vendors or needs flexible payouts, ask Cashfree and Razorpay about their payout and split-payment products, and ask each how it handles holds on funds that belong to vendors.

If you need broad payment-method or currency coverage, or already have a relationship with a provider through a bank or accountant, include PayU or your bank's gateway in the comparison, and check plugin currency for your platform.

If you sell mostly to customers abroad, ask Stripe about onboarding for your business type, and ask the Indian providers about international card acceptance, currency conversion and settlement currency. Your customers' cards and your exports may bring other rules and paperwork, so involve your accountant.

If you are only starting, with a few sales a week, begin with a payment-link product or a simple hosted checkout, and move to a full integration when orders justify the work. A simple setup you can run well beats a complex one that nobody maintains.

Whichever you choose, write down why. In a year, when your volume has changed or the rules have shifted, you will be able to revisit the decision with the same criteria.

• Standard store: Razorpay or Cashfree first, then compare written terms.
• Marketplace or payouts: ask about split payments and fund holds.
• Wide method or currency needs: include PayU or a bank gateway.
• Selling abroad: confirm Stripe availability and international card terms.
• Just starting: a payment link or hosted checkout is enough.

What is a sensible plan for the first 30 days?

A short plan keeps the project from drifting. Adjust the days to your situation, but keep the order.

Week one: shortlist and apply. List the questions from this guide, request written terms from two or three providers and compare them. Choose one and complete KYC. While approval is pending, finish your policy pages and make sure your website details match your documents.

Week two: integrate and test. Connect the gateway in test mode, build or configure the checkout and run the test list above. Fix any problems in webhooks, emails and order statuses.

Week three: go live quietly. Switch to live keys, take a small real payment yourself and refund it. Share the site with a few friendly customers and watch the first orders closely.

Week four: review and tune. Reconcile the gateway report with your bank and your orders. Look at failed payments and abandoned carts. If failures cluster on one method or one browser, investigate it. Check that your confirmation emails and invoices are correct.

After the first month, set a monthly rhythm: review payment success rate, failed payments, refunds, settlement dates and plugin versions. If you want help with the build, our team can set up and test the integration as part of an ecommerce website, or you can read our guide on starting an online store in India for the wider picture.

Do not forget privacy. Your checkout collects names, phone numbers and addresses, so your site needs a clear privacy notice and sensible handling of data. Our DPDP Act website checklist explains the basics, and your lawyer can confirm what applies to you.