Due to the Indian Reserve Bank's policies since October 2021, online transactions are much more heavily regulated. This is because of a high volume of scamming into and out of India.
These new regulations prevent Indian customers from making online purchases globally when the amount is too high. Payment problems from Indian customers are a widely reported issue that has been in global e-commerce news consistently since October 2021. Famously, Apple app subscriptions all failed in India after this update, which Apple was able to fix by developing their own custom payment solution.
Unfortunately, we do not have the tens of millions of dollars necessary to fix the problem like Apple did.
After extensive discussions with multiple banks in India and the trade commissioners of India, we have identified a number of reasons payments may fail:
The transaction amount is too high. Unfortunately, we have not found a consistent number at which payments always fail. However, a payment over 18,000 rupees seems more likely to fail.
Your bank is not compliant with the latest Indian governmental policies. There are over 100 banks in India, and we have found that many have not updated their online security protocols since the 2021 mandates. In our conversations with some of these banks, they seem to be unaware of the problem, or reluctant to fix it. In this situation, we recommend changing to a larger bank.
Your card has been blacklisted. We have had reports that some cards consistently fail, even when we know the bank's security policy is updated. In these situations, there may be some unknown problem with the card itself. Unfortunately, neither our payment processors nor the respective card-issuing banks in India are able to provide information on why or when this occurs.
Note that these problems typically only affect larger purchases made internationally. We are currently investigating multiple other solutions as a high priority to overcome this problem and serve our very large Indian customer base. However, the lack of clear insight by government agents and banks has made progress challenging.
If you are currently struggling with payment issues, we recommend trying a card from another, major bank or paying in instalments.
To our knowledge, the problem is with your bank's security protocols and we are unable to fix the problem directly. Thank you for your patience as we explore workaround solutions.