Updated below with additional information
Online shopping site Flipkart.com has started accepting International cards for payments. It has partnered with CyberSource, a Visa Company to enable international payment.
The company said that it will accept payments made using Visa, MasterCard, and American Express credit/debit cards in 21 countries outside India: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US. We believe this will allow international users to send gifts to friends and family in India.
Update: Fraud detection: The company claims that CyberSource’s fraud management solution will provide Flipkart with access to the Fraud Detection Radar. It has an access to over 260 real-time global validation tests, derived from from the over 60 billion transactions processed annually by Visa and CyberSource. Apart from that, CyberSource’s Decision Manager will also operate alongside Flipkart’s in-house fraud detection system, FRANK, to provide coverage across domestic and international orders.
No digital good support
It should be noted that while the website has started accepting international cards for payments on physical goods, internationally issued credit cards cannot be used for Flyte, Wallet and eGV payments/top-ups.
It makes sense for Flipkart to not support digital goods, since the company has probably signed domestic licensing deals with content companies and to support International cards and offer the service internationally, it would have to sign international licencing deals with these content companies.
Typically when a distribution company licenses digital content, the deal usually restricts them distribute content to select geographic locations. The geographic licencing deals also affects the pricing of the content. For example, you might have noticed that it’s cheaper to buy an album from India than from the US online stores.
Other developments
Earlier in the day, we reported that Google owned YouTube had integrated purchase of digital goods from Flipkart and iTunes. In February 2013, we had reported that Flipkart is planning to launching a marketplace and was looking to sign up external sellers for the launch of its marketplace. A sign-in page for sellers has gone live at sellers.flipkart.com, and the company is inviting sellers to list their products on Flipkart, and says it will allow for logistics through Flipkart’s partners.
Last year, Flipkart was reportedly being probed for FDI norms violation, although Flipkart had denied that any raid took place. Flipkart’s CFO had however resigned in February 2013, following the incident. Flipkart had also reportedly raised $150 million from Naspers and Tiger Global in August last year.