Scaling Digital Payments for IPL
Introduction
The IPL, inarguably the world’s most popular Twenty20 cricket tournament, draws hundreds of millions of fans who passionately follow each game over a two-month period.
But the 2023 edition of the Indian Premier League changed the sports streaming landscape in the country forever, with roughly half a billion users tuning in. (Source)
With numbers surpassing Youtube’s ~460 million in Indian audience and millions of impressions up for grabs, this season of the IPL presented itself as one of the most important customer-acquisition funnel for startups.
The Scale of IPL
While Jio worked closely with its content delivery network (CDN) partners and telecom rivals to boost its hosting capacity for the tournament, startups in India were also gearing up to handle the scale of the IPL.
New Product Launches, record signups, and millions of users up for grabs - the IPL is as festive as it gets for startups.
Millions of Customers
This IPL broke records left and right.
Over 32 Million people million people tuned in to watch the CSK vs GT IPL 2023 final on Jio Cinema making it the most-viewed live-stream event.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) 2023 match between Chennai Super Kings and Gujarat Titans on May 23 saw concurrent viewership on JioCinema touching 25 Million.
The previous viewership record on JioCinema was 24 Million, registered during the CSK versus RCB match on April 17.
CSK are the Kings, but brands bat on a whole another plane in IPL.
IPL campaigns are on fire .. today I found out @CRED_club is up 6-7x in terms of daily sign ups after launch of IPL campaign 🚀🚀
— Shailendra J Singh (@sjs_day1) September 24, 2020
You guys crushed it @AnilKapoor @kunalb11 🙏🙏
Record Breaking Conversions & Signups
Add to this, the continued popularity of fantasy sports and huge marketing budgets and you get a Tsunami of signups and users engaging with brands. Dream 11 was shattering records like Dhoni.
New Product Launches
Brands have been leveraging advertising on television for driving conversions and brand impact. Unprecedented reach and exceptionally high engagement make the IPL a massive customer acquisition channel for traditional as well as emerging brands. It is almost a time-honoured tradition for brands to launch new products, run campaigns, and ride on customers’ excitement.
The IPL is an unmissable opportunity for brands to drive growth. Millions of customers mean millions of transactions. And the last thing, any brand would want is to get bowled by a payment failure on the Checkout page. The Checkout Page is the ultimate moment of truth in the customer journey where the massive costs of IPL advertising bear fruit and convert into revenue.
Let’s understand how can you as a business prepare your Payments for the scale of IPL.
Scaling Payments for the IPL
With great power comes great responsibility, and with scale as massive as the IPL, come bigger responsibilities. While the soaring popularity of fantasy sports and IPL brings in massive revenue and customer numbers for companies, it can spell trouble for Payments Infrastructure. You must prepare to grapple with an unprecedented surge in transactions while ensuring peak customer experience.
It may sound like an outlandish notion, but it’s as real as it gets. Over the years, people have voiced frustrations about streaming services struggling to handle the colossal influx of live game viewership, leading to chaotic infrastructural challenges. These companies have worked tirelessly to rectify the situation, but it has become an ongoing endeavour, demanding substantial investments, meticulous planning, and prudent decision-making.
The ultimate goal is to ensure that interruptions during IPL broadcasts are limited to the ad breaks alone, and do not spillover to user experience.
Challenges - The Tsunami of Transactions
Let’s hear it from the CIO at a leading Private bank,
“The scale is very unpredictable. While we look at it from a March 31 perspective, I know that on March 31, IPL also started. When IPL starts, Dream11 fantasy cricket transactions also happen. As a bank, you will budget for higher transactions during IPL. These things can happen at a fixed period. Scale is very specific to the institution. Some institutions may have built up scale on their internet gateway, but not on the backend. Some may have built up scale on the backend, but not on the internet gateway.” Source
Juspay - Built for your Scale
Peak season is a critical time for businesses, and payments play a crucial role in ensuring smooth operations. Unfortunately, merchants can run into payment failures and escalating costs during peak season, which negatively impacts their plans.
To avoid these issues and make payments a facilitator of business success during peak season, merchants can follow these steps:
- Involve payments early in peak season planning
- Resolve lingering payments issues
- Optimise the customer journey
- Analyse and optimise payments pricing
- Stress test and verify payments technology performance
By following these steps, retailers can mitigate potential payment-related issues, improve the customer experience, and leverage payments as a strategic asset to drive business success during peak season. Let’s dive into these elements to understand the nuances of peak season planning.
Engaging in peak season planning early on
Effective planning is crucial for achieving success during peak seasons. Juspay’s approach involves close collaboration with retailers, working alongside their Payments and Product teams to integrate payments seamlessly into the planning process. By engaging early on, we can assess the impact of planned campaigns on payments and provide valuable insights and recommendations.
Once decisions are made, we work in partnership with our customers to ensure swift implementation. This allows ample time for testing, configuration, and readiness before the peak season commences.
While it’s ideal for businesses to prepare their payments stack well in advance of peak seasons, we recognize that circumstances can change. In such cases, we are agile and ready to accommodate any necessary adjustments quickly and efficiently. Our dedicated team and adaptable platform enable us to expedite the process, even enabling businesses to go live and start processing payments within a few days, if required.
At every stage, our goal is to support our customers in maximising their peak season performance by aligning payment strategies with their overall business objectives.
Resolve Lingering Payments Issues
To ensure a smooth peak season, merchants should delve into their payments data to uncover any hidden issues that could be amplified during high transaction volumes. By analyzing the data, merchants can identify trends and patterns that may indicate problems with declined transactions, authentication issues, or unusual activity from specific markets. Collaborating with payment partners is crucial in addressing these identified issues.
Having a firm understanding of payments data will also help merchants when peak season arrives. By establishing a baseline for normal payment performance, merchants can quickly identify anomalies and take proactive steps to maximize transaction success rates or detect fraudulent activity while minimizing false declines.
Merchants should study core metrics such as success rates, transaction latency, and conduct a thorough analysis of payment fees. It’s also important to review the reliability and latency of payment systems at different times throughout the year.
Optimising the customer journey
As we near the IPL, the focus shifts to two major areas: New development timelines and load management.
For their quarterly roadmap in January, the IPL centric merchants invariably target to freeze all code by the middle of March and only bug fixes are done until IPL is over. Juspay, on its part, commits additional hours and resources to our partners to complete all collaborative developments within the timeline. This may involve testing any new flows or adding new features or payment instruments for the merchant.
Optimise payments performance & pricing
The cost of accepting payments is a significant expense for merchants, and finding ways to optimize these costs can have a substantial impact on their bottom line.
By diving into the data and analyzing payment pricing at a granular level, merchants can gain insights into the costs associated with different payment schemes, issuers, and third-party processors.
As part of our commitment to helping businesses with their peak season plans, Juspay utilises the rich data available on our platform to address lingering payment issues and uncover potential opportunities for improvement.
One of the steps we take is conducting a comprehensive analysis of success rates. This analysis enables us to pinpoint specific areas where improvements can be made to minimise payment declines. Based on the findings, we can make adjustments to our system settings or leverage our strong relationships with issuers and card networks to resolve any identified issues.
By leveraging our data and industry partnerships, we strive to optimise the payment process for businesses, ensuring a seamless and successful peak season experience.
Stress test Payments Performance
On the load management front, we begin a consultative exercise at the beginning of March with each merchant. With the previous season as benchmark, we try to arrive at an expected peak for each. This is called TPS (Transactions per second). By adding all suck peaks and then inserting a safety margin, an internal TPS peak is arrived at, for every hour. This allows us to properly plan for transaction surges and guards against any surprises.
Get ready for peak season with Juspay
With over a decade of experience in working with online merchants, we have gained a deep understanding of the dynamics that shape peak season and how we can assist businesses in achieving their revenue goals. Our teams collaborate with merchants, offering support and guidance leading up to and throughout the peak season to prepare their payments technology and processes for the surge in demand.
A robust and reliable Payments partner is indispensable for merchants to hit boundaries on the Payments Pitch. Drop us a message here or at biz@juspay.in to elevate the IPL experience for your business and your customers.
