Psychology of Online Payments 💳

❎Your phone or computer is not a payment device.

Your phone is a social device and your computer is a work or productivity device.

🤔So, maybe that’s the reason why you don’t associate the pain of payment made via these 2 routes.

Instead, you feel the pleasure of consumption because of the way these devices are tagged to your psychology.

🔬Let’s deep dive a little:-

When you finish a task on these devices, you associate that emotion of finishing the task with joy or satisfaction in the case of a productivity tool.

It’s completely different when you pay via Card or cash.

😢They are primarily a payment instrument and that’s why you feel the pain of payment, physiologically.

💰Let’s go back a few years down the line when you were making a payment of 4570 via cash.

You paid via some notes and maybe got a few notes in return for the service/product.

This exchange of service/product is an instant association of pain.

Now this vector of pain is absent in the non-card/cash payment flow.

There are 4 flows ➖

1. you scan a QR, enter the payment amount and enter the UPI pin
2. you can a QR code, the amount is already entered and you end the UPI pin
3. You scan a QR, enter the amount and are done (this is UPI lite)
4. a payment page where the amount is mentioned, card details are entered and you have to approve the auto-read OTP

Now these 4 are in decreasing order of pain of payment.

Why?

Because we are distancing the association of action of payment with the feel of payment.

How do we delay it even further?

EMIs.

You make the payment but money needs to be debited and you receive the product/service almost instantly.

It feels like a reward or what a marketing campaign says ‘Steal deal 🎉.

You can pay for an item over the space of maybe 6 months. The pain of paying almost doesn’t exist as opposed to when it’s a 1-day window. And so because you have that distance, it feels a little bit less painful. How to reduce this pain of payment even further, bundle this EMI with quick product delivery.

I think this is going in the direction of boy math, girl math and other kind of math which was very popular on reels for a couple of weeks this month.

So, this whole case talks about a new kind of behavior around payment.

Behaviors are learned through **conditioning** and can be modified or changed through **reinforcement** and **punishment**.

In the end, we moved from ‘Aaj zyada kharcha ho gya’ to ‘this month was expensive’. We have somehow delayed the pain of payment from everyday things to monthly things.

🔮Looks like digital payment works like a drug for our wallets.