Shoppers Stop Ltd : Credit Card Processing Application

More than half of Shoppers Stop sales are through credit and debit cards.

Each transaction requires a fee (sometimes called discounting fee) to be paid to

the transaction acquiring bank which is a percentage of the sale amount. To make

sure that the bank with the lowest processing charge at that point in time gets

the bulk of the transactions and to cater to customers' preferences on their

choice of acquirer, retailers traditionally deploy multiple EDC machines

supplied by the banks at their Point of Sale. This increases the clutter at

these critical touch points. Further the Customer Care Associates (CCAs) have to

be briefed regularly regarding EDCs to be used. Each EDC transaction is done

over traditional PSTN lines which are designed for carrying voice rather than

data. This results in transactions taking longer times which in turn snow ball

into longer check out queues and at peak time lost sales on account of

frustrated customers abandoning their shopping baskets. The end result is loss

of several million rupees in sales and dissatisfied customers. To battle this

problems Shoppers Stop and hence Pine Labs came up with an application called

Plutus which was initially only working with ICICI. Gradually it was also

upgraded to work with Citibank making it an ideal product for Shoppers Stop.