Rapyd B2Bot

Easy Payments, Easy Business

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Inspiration

As per the hackathon problem, "70% of online carts are abandoned and businesses are leaving $260 billion dollars a year on the table because of bad checkout experiences. This is a problem that must be solved." We wanted to build a new B2B checkout experience using one of the most common messaging platforms in use today. So, we have built a B2B checkout experience, embedded within a WhatsApp bot.

What it does

Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, etc are being used as a new platform for business for both D2C and B2B. It is more useful for small size businesses where the seller doesn't have any specific site for checkout and payment. They tend to send photos/pdfs to the end-user and in turn, the end-user types the checkout cart manually to the seller. Post that seller sends a tentative invoice to the end-user and also provides the bank account/UPI/wallet address for the payment. End-user does the payment and sends the transaction proof to get the order fulfilled.

The Rapyd B2Bot, as we are calling it now, helps businesses place orders with other companies, and gives them an easy checkout experience within the realms of WhatsApp. They can place the order, and then either choose to pay it then and there or can also opt for a Pay Later option. Our bot will keep track of the due dates, and users can pay all of their outstanding dues from the bot itself.

How we built it

We built the bot using the Landbot platform (https://landbot.io/). We created our backend using node.js and hosted it on Heroku. We used the Rapyd API to generate the checkout links.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the right platform for building the bot was a challenge, as we were not using the WhatsApp Business API directly (as it's meant for businesses).

Understanding the workings of the Rapyd API was a challenge initially. It took some time and lots of patience to get there. Debugging some of the issues regarding the API was difficult, and would not have been possible without support on Discord.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of being able to integrate the Rapyd API successfully within our WhatsApp chatbot, as we were learning multiple new things at once. So, we are proud of being able to put it all together.

What we learned

  1. Learnt to create WhatsApp bots.
  2. Learnt how B2B payments work.
  3. Learnt to use Rapyd APIs.

What's next for Rapyd B2Bot

  1. We will also provide recurring/auto-debit features at the user's end so that we can support EMI options. Sellers will easily scale up the business and also have no need to do bookkeeping.
  2. We will use payout with FX (Foreign Exchange ) to support inter-currency purchases.
  3. We will also support group payments where more than 1 customer can pay their amount simultaneously on a single checkout page.
  4. We will also support the option of partial payment where a customer can pay partially at the time of checkout and the remaining can be paid on receiving the order.
  5. We will also send reminders to the users for any outstanding payments and in turn, will provide the option of batch payments.

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