Ayojak, a Pune-based company that offers a suite of technology solutions & services for online event ticket selling, conference registrations, payment processing, event promotion, and event logistics, has become one of the first such services to integrate COD (cash-on-delivery) as a payment option for their online event ticket sales service.

As anybody familiar with the ecommerce situation in India is aware, COD is one of the most important forms of payment in Indian ecommerce, since Indians are still not very comfortable with using credit cards online. Thus, offering a COD option almost becomes a must-have for any product or service that is being sold online. Inspite of the fact that COD is an expensive option in general (often with charges of up to Rs. 100 per delivery), it is still the most common form of payment for many ecommerce vendors in India.

In this context, we believe that this announcement by Ayojak would be welcomed by many event organizers and potential customers of Ayojak.

In an article on YourStory.in, Santosh Panda, Founder & CEO of Ayojak explains the thought process behind this announcement:

“We see that close to 45-55% of our users have trouble in booking tickets online through Net banking, Credit cards or Debit cards, sometimes the payment gateway is too busy to respond or the connection is very slow and the browser times out. Because of these various reasons most of the users or frustrated with the online ticket booking experience and prefer the offline mode. Even from our in-house research and analysis and from consumer surveys – we see that the demand for CoD is very high in India, as a major chunk of our population still do not have access to Debit or Credit cards and not to forget the large community of students as well.”

Here are more details of the exact service offered:

Ayojak have integrated their event ticketing & registration e-commerce engine with several logistics solution provider like – FedEx (AFL), GharPay, and Santa Claus Couriers. This tie up will enable Event Organisers to reach the last miles of customer’s convenience and enables users to buy event tickets from the comforts of their home, office or other various locations from across 3000 cities/town in India. For all CoD delivered using Ayojak’s integrated solution, event organizers will be provided with a detailed CoD tracking system and easy, timely and assured delivery of orders. Ayojak has already been privately serving few selected customers to deliver thousands of CoD across India.

PuneTech caught up with Santosh Panda to get a few more details about this new service in particular, and about Ayojak in general.

Are there any other online event/ticketing providers that providers that provide an integrated COD solution? If yes, how is Ayojak’s solution different?

Santosh: There are likes of BookMyShow.com who do this for bigger events only. However with Ayojak, any event (whether big or small) now can avail the COD solution and plan to reach much larger segment of event ticket buyers to pay via cash. Our other competitors don’t have this solution.

What are the extra charges for COD tickets?

Santosh: We are charging 100 rs for delivery less than 1700 rs. For delivery amount from 1701 Rs onward, we charge 6%. The rates may sound higher but if we compare average online charge which is 5%, this is reasonable. Also COD has several complexities such as genuine buyers vs. not, insurance by logistics provider whether money is lost/stolen, support for COD tracking, many such issues. Also COD is designed as part of payment solution suite.

Can you give a quick overview of Ayojak? How is it different from the competition?

Santosh: Ayojak’s mission is to solve 360 degree aspect of an event management. Hence while competitors are focusing on online registration only, we are solving customer’s following pain such as :

• Payment via online-cash-retail payment solution : Helping event organizer to avail all payment channel and sell it out
• Promote: Ayojak promotes event heavily in various channels and we consider this as our job. Whereas our competitors don’t provide this as a service or spend time in helping an event get promoted. Ayojak provides promotions like ‘digital marketing, social media contest/content oriented promotion, advertisement on Google Ad/LinkedIn’. We intend to bring more ‘conversion’ oriented solution in coming days.
• Support: Ayojak provides huge support during an event such as answering event attendee queries, event setup related help if needed, tracking each payment and reaching buyer to help them to select other options, many such. Our customers are very happy with Ayojak support.
• Product : While our competitors looking event as one type, Ayojak is designed to treat each event type differently. For example a ‘Sonu Nigam Event’ is different from ‘Indian Medical Conference’. Therefore we have developed different apps such as ticketing app, conference app to solve the process flow needed in each type.

Also Ayojak apps are designed keeping the 360 degree principle : Create, Promote, Sell, Support.

Where is Ayojak located. Specifically we’re interested in what part of Ayojak is in Pune, and what exactly does the Pune team do.

Santosh: Ayojak’s Pune team is the prime team, most of our biz/tech decisions/development happens from Pune. Also our key sales & marketing team in pune, although we have freelancers and employees located in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad/Visakhapatnam.

For more information, check out Ayojak.com