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Ask ten Indian D2C founders which gateway is best and you get three answers, each backed by one bad week with the other two. That is the honest picture: Razorpay, PayU and Cashfree are all licensed, all support UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets, and all have days when a bank's UPI switch misbehaves. The differences that matter are about fit, and about whether you have to pick only one.
What genuinely differs
- Success rates by method. Each gateway routes to banks differently; a store's UPI success rate can differ by a few points between them, and it changes over time. Measure yours, don't assume.
- Settlement. Standard settlement cycles are similar; early or same-day settlement is offered on different terms by each. Read the fee for it, not just the availability.
- Dashboards and refunds. How quickly a refund lands and how easy it is to find a failed payment vary more than the rates do.
- Support. For most stores this is the real differentiator — who picks up when a settlement is late on a sale day.
Fees: compare the effective rate
Published MDR is a starting point. Compare the effective rate on your actual method mix — UPI is priced differently from cards, and if 60% of your prepaid orders are UPI, a small UPI difference outweighs a large card difference. Ask each for a rate card against your real volume; all three negotiate above a threshold.
The Shopify-specific wrinkle
On Shopify's native checkout, an Indian gateway is a third-party provider, and on plans below Shopify Plus Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of the gateway's MDR. A checkout that runs payments through your own gateway account rather than Shopify's checkout does not attract that fee — which for many stores is a bigger saving than any difference between the three gateways.
Why you may want two
A gateway-agnostic checkout removes the need to pick. Run Razorpay as primary and PayU or Cashfree as secondary; route UPI to whichever has the better success rate this month; fail over when one has an outage on a sale night. Settlement still goes directly from each gateway to your bank — the checkout orchestrates, it never holds funds. Razorpay Magic, by contrast, requires Razorpay as the gateway; that is a fine choice if you have decided on Razorpay, and a constraint if you have not.
A simple way to decide
- Already on one with no complaints? Keep it, and add a second only for failover.
- Starting fresh? Onboard two, run both for a month, and look at UPI success rate and refund speed side by side.
- Heavy on UPI? Weight the decision almost entirely on UPI success rate and UPI pricing.
- Heavy on COD? The gateway matters less than the COD controls sitting in front of it.
See it live on a private preview of your checkout.