Taking eSewa and Khalti payments on your shop website
Walk down New Road on a Saturday afternoon and watch how people pay. Ten years ago it was folded notes and the shopkeeper digging through a steel cash box for change. Now half the counters have a laminated QR standee taped up beside the till, and the customer holds their phone out for two seconds to show the green tick. Nobody organised this. It happened wallet by wallet, shop by shop, until scanning became as normal as haggling.
If you are putting your shop online, you eventually face the same question the counter already answered: how does the money actually move? Card payments never really arrived in Nepal for daily shopping. The wallets did. So the online payment conversation here is really an eSewa and Khalti conversation, with cash on delivery standing in the corner refusing to leave. This post is about all three, and about the one thing that matters more than any of them: whether your customer believes their money arrived and their order is real.
How the wallets won the counter
eSewa has been around since 2009, but for years most people used it for two things: mobile top ups and the electricity bill. Khalti came later and pushed hard on the same territory. That history matters, because the trust was built on small, boring, repeated payments. Somebody who has topped up their phone two hundred times without a problem does not hesitate to send NPR 500 for a pair of socks.
Then QR codes landed on every counter, and the habit jumped from bills to shopping. Today the aunty who runs the vegetable stall near your chowk takes wallet payments, and so does the electronics shop in Baneshwor with three lakh rupees of stock in the window. The customer's trust did not move from cash to the internet. It moved from cash to a specific app on their own phone, with their own PIN, showing a confirmation screen they have seen a thousand times.
That is the environment your website enters. You are not teaching anyone a new behaviour. You are asking them to do a familiar thing in a slightly new place. That is a much easier ask.
Cash on delivery is not backward, it is rational
Every Nepali online seller has an opinion about cash on delivery, and most of the opinions are complaints. But be honest about why customers insist on it. They have been burned. Everyone knows someone who ordered a jacket from a Facebook page, paid in advance, and received either nothing or something that looked nothing like the photo. Returns are painful, complaints move slowly, and the safest move for the buyer is simple: I will pay when I am holding the thing.
So cash on delivery is not a sign that your customers are old fashioned. It is a sign that they are careful, and they are right to be, because the burden of proof sits with the shop, not the buyer.
The costs land on your side though. Say a NPR 600 order of momo comes in from Patan side and your kitchen is in Baneshwor. Your rider crosses the city, calls twice, and the customer's phone is off. Now you have paid the fare both ways, the achar has gone everywhere in the bag, and you have earned nothing. Even two failed deliveries a week gives cash on delivery a real price. Add the small daily frictions: the rider carrying cash all day, the change problem on a NPR 1,020 bill, the money reaching your drawer a day or two late.
What prepaid actually gives you
When a customer pays through a wallet before you pack anything, three things change.
- Joke orders disappear. Nobody sends NPR 1,850 from their Khalti for fun. A paid order is a wanted order.
- Your cash flow breathes. In the Dashain rush, when you are buying stock on Tuesday to sell on Friday, money that arrives with the order instead of days later is not a small thing.
- The doorstep argument ends. The rider hands over the parcel and leaves. No change, no counting, no "I will pay half now".
The trade off is just as real: some buyers will not prepay to a shop they have never heard of, and a hard prepaid rule will cost you first time customers. The sensible middle path most shops land on is both. Let the first order be cash on delivery, deliver it well, and watch the same customer prepay happily the second time. Keep a rule for the risky cases, something like: orders above NPR 3,000, or deliveries outside the Ring Road, prepaid only. Print the rule on the site so it reads as policy, not suspicion.
Trust is built with receipts, not logos
Here is the part sellers underestimate. The scariest moment in a prepaid purchase is the ten seconds after the customer presses send. Did it go through? Did the shop see it? Is my order real now, or do I have to screenshot the transaction and message someone on WhatsApp?
Answer those ten seconds well and you have a customer for years. That means:
- An order number the customer sees immediately, with the items and the exact amount.
- A confirmation email that arrives on its own, without anyone asking.
- A clear line about what happens next: we deliver tomorrow between 2 and 5, or your table order is being prepared.
- On paper, a proper PAN or VAT invoice in the bag. That slip quietly says: we are registered, we are findable, you can come back.
This is where a proper website earns its keep over an Instagram DM thread. Shops on Pasal already get the receipt machinery: order confirmation emails go out automatically, and the till can print PAN and VAT invoices with your registration on them. The wallet is only the pipe. The receipt is the trust.
Where Pasal is with wallets, honestly
Straight answer: eSewa and Khalti checkout on Pasal is coming, and it is not live today. Right now your shop takes the order online, in NPR, and you collect the money the way the counter always has: cash at the till, cash on delivery, or your own wallet QR shown at handover, which is how a large share of Kathmandu commerce runs anyway. Regulars who settle monthly can go in the digital khata instead, so nobody is scribbling credit on the back of a calendar.
When the wallet buttons switch on, everything around them will already be in place: the order flow, the emailed confirmation, the printed invoice, promo codes if you run a festival offer. You will not rebuild your shop. The same money will simply have one more way to arrive.
Get ready before the wallets arrive
If you want to be prepaid ready, the work is mostly not technical.
1. Get your registration in order. A PAN number on the invoice does more for trust than any badge on a website. 2. Write your payment and delivery rules down, plainly, where buyers can see them. 3. Decide your cash on delivery limits now: which areas, what minimum, what happens when a delivery fails. 4. Answer the phone. A confirmed order is one where a human said yes, we got it.
Do that, and whether the money comes as folded notes at the door or a green tick on a screen, the customer leaves with the same feeling: this shop is real, and my money was safe here.
If you want to see what the order and receipt side looks like before the wallets land, the templates are at https://pasal.studio/demo, and building your own shop takes about five minutes at https://pasal.studio/start.