27th September 2021

In the last essay of the UPI series we discussed about the UPI Push flow in a P2P transaction. Today, we will see a couple of more flows majorly from a customer/ merchant perspective.

Collect Flow

Mona buys a goodie box from Amazon and wishes to pay via UPI. Let's see what steps she will have to go through in case of a collect flow:

1. Mona enters her VPA on the Amazon website/ app after choosing UPI as a payment method
2. Amazon verifies if the VPA is valid or not
3. Notification gets triggered on her UPI app; GPay
4. She clicks the notification & enters the app using PIN/ fingerprint
5. A screen with collect request from Amazon appears
6. Mona selects "Pay" and proceeds to complete the transaction by entering the UPI or mPIN.

Drawbacks with this flow:

• Broken flow: Entering VPA manually can be cumbersome, What was my UPI ID again!? Notifications might fail or take time. At times users may have to manually check in to the UPI apps for requests
• Unknown drop offs: Merchant is unaware of the steps taken by user after she leaves the merchant app. Why did she abandon her purchase? Where exactly does the problem lie?

Intent Flow

In this case, Mona will have flexibility over her choices. The merchant will let Mona choose from the UPI apps installed on her phone.

1. After proceeding to pay, the merchant app will clearly ask the method of payment (cards, wallets, UPI, etc.)
2. Merchant app will provide her with all the PSPs installed on her phone (GPay, PhonePe, Paytm, etc.)