Smart Links

Defending margins & opening new markets with just a link

Jan, 2019 · Role: Product Manager & Head of Design · Company: Instamojo

Problem

Businesses deploy a stack of specialised departments to deliver the end result. Payment Links, Instamojo's flagship product, solves the sales part of their stack. Millions of businesses use Payment Links to close sales on WhatsApp, SMS, websites, etc.

Fast-growing businesses found it difficult to scale payment links. With new processes and software, links would become a pain instead of a pain-killer. Payment Links needed to solve more problems.

Insights

It wasn't about adding features. Talking to our customers we learned that it's important:

  1. to allow their customers to calculate the price
  2. to look professional & trustworthy and give information before & after the payment
  3. to collect data with the payment, so other departments can begin their work. Eg: Shipping details, invoicing details, donor details, etc.

These things were critical for their entire business stack. (Read more on insights we gained from our user research.)

Smart Links solve critical problems for several departments of a growing business.

Data showed us that the following type of businesses were likely to face these problems:

  1. Small businesses selling services to consumers
  2. Businesses selling products & services to businesses (B2B)

Solution

It was a challenge to cover use cases and feature requests for a variety of industries. We made it as simple as we could:

When creating Smart Links business critical features come first.

Features that have an impact on the cash-flow come first when creating a Smart Link. For e.g.: businesses don't want to oversell inventory or run a discount for too long.

When creating Smart Links, we hide variety of complex features in a simple flow

Everything else comes next and is optional.

The smart in Smart Links

Smart Links understand the pain you're trying to address. Consider data collection:

Using Smart Links, businesses can collect Shipping Address with the payment. This is a critical feature if you sell & ship products.

Smart link payment experince

Smart Links optimize the payment experience to minimize drop-offs.

They can also collect business details for invoicing. Their customers get an option to add the shipping address, billing address, GSTN, and the company name while making a payment. By clicking one checkbox.

This saves hours of manual work.

Results

Within 60 days of launch, 5% of our active user base adopted Smart Links with zero budget spent on marketing.

Smart Link users are the most engaged and are more likely to use our value-added services.

"I have a payment option on my website; I create Smart Links to give special treatment to my special and loyal customers."

— A handicraft artist who uses Instamojo

A new market

Many API users started using Smart Links. We didn't expect that because API users could make these features within days.

After talking to them we realised they have a tech-team but no time to solve these problems. They'd rather have a payments expert handle these problems and focus on their core business.

Smart Links is an API alternative for small or non-tech businesses; it's an API companion for bigger and tech-enabled businesses.

Smart Links is an API companion for large businesses. It reduces cost by taking care of edge-cases and short-lived use cases. Smart Links is an API alternative for small businesses. It reduces cost because business can delay the cost of API integration for years.

A moat against margin erosion

  1. Payments is a low-margin business
  2. There are other market players (SaaS) solving these problems with standalone products

With Smart Links, businesses get these solutions practically for free. All they pay is 2% + Rs. 3 per transaction.

While other payment players in the market resort to reducing rates to acquire users—we continue to have pricing power.

Instamojo's pay-as-you-use model works better for small businesses.

Team