A customer should never be able to tell how many payment providers sit behind your checkout button.
Cards and India-native UPI are completely different animals — different flows, different states, different ways to fail. The lazy version exposes that mess to the user: pick your provider, learn our plumbing, good luck. The result is hesitation, and hesitation at the payment step is a lost order.
If both rails felt like one button — same interface, same confidence, the differences handled quietly underneath — you'd lose nobody to confusion. The complexity doesn't disappear; it just moves to where it belongs, out of the customer's way.
That's what I did shipping Saturdays, a food-ordering marketplace running live payments through both Stripe and PhonePe. They're integrated behind a single, unified checkout, with each provider's states handled deliberately rather than optimistically — because the payment step is the one part of the product a customer cannot forgive getting wrong.
The principle is older than payments: absorb complexity on behalf of your user. Every messy branch you handle internally is a decision they don't have to make.
More of what I ship → www.divyakush.com
