Is India your home market? Thinking of expanding into APAC from overseas? Selling here isn’t always simple.
Choose a Merchant of Record like Paddle, and you can offer your customers the payment methods they expect, get more payments approved, and stay on top of India's tax and compliance requirements.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
- How to improve checkout conversion in India
- Why your payment acceptance in India is lower than you’d expect
- The tax and compliance requirements of selling in India
- Ways to optimize revenue as you scale
- How Paddle helps you grow.
Improve checkout conversion with Indian payment methods
Whether your customers are making a one-off purchase or signing up for a subscription, most customers in India want to pay using UPI. Cards matter too, sure. But they’re mostly used for higher-value or cross-border purchases.
India’s payment landscape: In numbers:
- UPI accounts for 86% of all digital transactions in India.
- India’s digital consumption is expected to grow by 500% by 2030
- 20% of customers abandon checkout when their preferred payment method isn’t available.
Local currency: When pricing feels familiar, buying feels easier
Show your prices in Indian Rupees (INR) and you could see up to 51% higher conversion at checkout.
Take Enhancv. The resume-building platform used to sell only in USD. With Paddle, it can now offer multiple currencies, including INR, and has increased payment acceptance to 89%.
With Paddle, I can add a new currency in five minutes. This removes a pain point for customers since they are charged what they see on their screens.”
Aleksandar Ginovski, Head of Product, Enhancv
Make your pricing work harder in India
Don’t forget: Your customers in India expect lower prices than those in the EU or US. Align your pricing with what customers are willing to pay, and you could see up to 50% higher growth.
What stands in the way of payment acceptance in India?
Your localized checkout is ready? Great! But here’s the catch – failed payments in India might still crop up.
It’s rarely because your customers don’t want to pay. More often, it’s something small getting in the way: a card expiring, a temporary network issue, or because the payment service provider (PSP) doesn’t perform well in that market.
Did you know?
In 80-90% of cases, a payment failure occurs because of a soft decline, not because your customer doesn’t want to pay.
Most digital software businesses rely on just one PSP. But here’s the thing: No single PSP performs consistently everywhere. A payment Stripe declines in India could be approved by another provider.
Paddle uses multi-PSP routing to retry soft declines in the background. That means you get more of your payments approved –across every market.
Take Indian-based quso.ai. The tech company generated over $100K in new revenue within the first 30 days of using Paddle.
Did you know?
Paddle's churn prevention features can help you improve failed payment recovery rates by 17%.
Paddle reduced the bank declines that we were seeing across every country by 2-3x.”
Vedant Maheshwari, CEO and Co-Founder, quso.ai
Selling internationally should open doors – not create a maze of new processes
Don’t forget: If you’re selling into India, you need to navigate the local regulatory and payments infrastructure.
There’s also ongoing requirements around tax, invoicing, refunds, disputes, and chargebacks. All of which can distract you from building and selling your product.
A Merchant of Record like Paddle takes the complexity off your plate. We handle payments, tax and compliance, so you can focus on growth.
Nexus Mods found this out the hard way. The online platform had to cancel 1,000 customer accounts in India after breaching local laws without even realizing.
By using Paddle as its Merchant of Record, Nexus Mods could offload sales tax and compliance entirely – and operate compliantly in over 205 countries.
The value is crystal clear though, we're able to focus entirely on our business goals…Paddle helps us do that by completely taking away those challenges around tax and compliance.”
Tom Mason, Director, Nexus Mods
Ready to sell beyond India? Don’t let complexity slow you down
If you’re based in India and starting to sell internationally, payments can get complicated fast.
You might need different PSPs, separate billing systems, and a way to keep up with the tax and compliance requirements of each new market you enter.
The more markets you add, the harder it becomes to keep track of everything.
“While we were able to scale our customer support team, we didn’t have the necessary specialist knowledge that was required. It was a drain on our time and resources and was becoming a real headache.” Kaan Ortabas, co-founder, HubX
A Merchant of Record like Paddle removes that friction, handling everything on your behalf.
Launch App2Web flows for the US, without the heavy lifting
Selling your app into the US from India? If so, that opens up more opportunities to secure more revenue.
For years, selling through the App Store into the US meant giving up 15-30% of every transaction to cover payments, tax, billing, and fraud.
That’s changing. Court rulings and new regulations now allow apps to direct customers in the US to external checkout. A web-based Merchant of Record model typically costs around 5–6% all in. That’s a fraction of the App Store's 15–30%.
How Paddle increases payment acceptance in India
From day one, Paddle gives you everything you need to sell into – and out of – India. Without the complexity of running multiple tools.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Localize your checkout for customers in India: Paddle supports UPI for one-time purchases and UPI Autopay for recurring subscriptions, with payments processed in INR. You don't need an Indian bank account or UPI merchant account to get started.
- Give more payments a chance to succeed: Paddle uses multi-PSP routing, smart dunning, tactical retries, and fraud screening to give payments coming from India the best chance of success.
- Offload the burden of sales tax and regulatory compliance: Paddle’s Merchant of Record (MoR) model means sales tax and regulatory compliance are handled as part of the same relationship - across more than 205 countries.
- Launch App2Web flows in US markets with confidence: Paddle partnered with Helium to help businesses selling from India into the US launch App-to-Web flows simply and easily. By combining AI-native paywall optimization with a fully integrated Merchant of Record, mobile sellers can move more revenue to the web with confidence and protect conversion.
- Experiment with region-specific pricing based on local willingness-to-pay: Get the insight you need to optimize pricing across different regions, plus the tools to test subscription tiers and pricing changes with confidence.
- Benefit from deep industry expertise and dedicated support: Paddle’s helped more than 10,000 digital product businesses, processing more than 190 million transactions – with support available 24/7.
India on the horizon? Sell successfully with Paddle
FAQs
What is a Merchant of Record?
A Merchant of Record (MoR) is the legal entity responsible for selling a product to the end customer. It takes on payments, tax collection, compliance, refunds, and chargebacks on your behalf, rather than you managing each of those separately yourself.
Do I need an Indian entity to sell SaaS in India?
It depends on how you handle payments – running your own infrastructure carries different obligations than using a Merchant of Record, which can handle much of this on your behalf.
Does Stripe work in India?
Stripe operates on an invite-only basis for businesses headquartered in India. It does support businesses selling into the country, though payment acceptance is often lower than expected since Stripe is a single PSP.
Stripe Managed Payments isn’t supported in India either - so you’d need to add separate tax and compliance tools to your payment stack to sell into India compliantly with Stripe.
