Have you ever hosted events where you are supposed to take entry fees or some registration amount from the attendees? If you have, then I'm sure you must have promoted them across all your social media networks and would have definitely done heavy Facebook promotion by way of creating an event but did you know that you can take payments from the attendees on Facebook?

I know I got you scratching your head over this but there is a way of doing so, you can integrate Facebook events directly with payments.

Meet FBPay!

FBPay is a platform which allows event organizers to enable their Facebook events with payments quickly and easily.

To use FBPay all you need is Facebook page, a bank account and a few minutes to spare. FBPay can be easily integrated with Facebook. You can set your event to start accepting payments via credit card, debit card or net banking. The people who want to attend the event can access the event through a link that automatically gets displayed on your Facebook event page.

Apart from using FBPay to turn your Facebook event into a sold-out event, you can use it to collect funds by way of creating a Facebook event for your fundraiser and reach out to people, and sell your products directly to your followers and friends.

FBPay's mission is "to simplify the online selling and buying process. We obsess over making every step easy so more people can do more online. We are doers trying to create a whole new set of doers."

To know more about FBPay we got in touch with the brains behind it and here's what we learnt.

Happy reading!

1. Please introduce yourself to our readers.

I'm Dhruv, co-founder of FBPay along with Rohit. Born and raised in Delhi, I studied (with Rohit) and worked in the US before coming back to India in late 2011. I currently lead product development at FBPay, keep DoubleFry Tech (our company) ticking, and make green tea for the team.

Hi I'm Rohit, co-founder and UX/UI Lead. I was born and brought up in the good 'ol USA (NY, CA, NJ to be exact) and shifted to Delhi a year ago to help start FBPay with one of my best friends from college [Dhruv]. It's a dream situation for a travel eccentric, user experience design addicted, Indian food-loving guy.

Hey, I'm Sabaa Shyamlee, Communications Lead at FBPay. Our company is based out of Delhi. We love chai and lots of gup shup on the side. and Yes, I am the only lady in this crazy geeky office.

The FBPay team

While working in a tech venture that was focusing on large events (think big rock concerts), we found that a lot of small and medium size event organizers did not have easy ways to collect payments for their events. They were setting up their events on Facebook, having great engagement with their fans and friends, but still picking up checks or cash, or waiting for bank transfers. This was how the idea of FBPay was incepted - to integrate payments into Facebook events, and make it extremely simple to set up.


FBPay is for makers and doers. Most of these folks have or offer something of value that people are willing to pay for, many times these people set up businesses around that offering. However, they are just starting and going through the process of setting up a site or payments or managing and maintaining those payments all takes time away from that core offering. FBPay makes it absurdly easy for these people to get things going and start turning their passions into their business. But it's not only about ease of use, it gives these sellers full control so they can manipulate and sell the way they want.


The User Experience is our first and foremost priority. Our customers have a ton of competing influencers that affect their experience with any online payment - trust in the platform? Intimidation of setup details? Fear of not selling anything? We tried to make FBPay as welcoming as possible so all users would be attracted and comforted by it, however we made sure to keep it flexible enough so that our users could achieve their unique goals.

I think so far we have done a decent job, the design is great but we could do more. So to answer the question, the design of the application has taken a year, and will take every year going forward. We build, learn, iterate, throw away, redesign, rebuild, relearn, and expect to continue this vicious cycle as we grow. It's pretty damn fun!

5. How many team of developers worked on creating FBPay?

We started developing the application by outsourcing it to a small team based in Gurgaon. Dhruv wrote the specs and sent it out and tried to get it built and out as fast as possible. The outsourced team was a total of 2 developers and 1 project lead. We then hired our own tech architect, Varun, and a front end developer, Siddhant, and started to shift the development of the code in-house. We are inherently a product company and knew to achieve the lofty goals we set, we have to have full control over what we build.

In addition to our 2 developers, we have 1 infrastructure lead, Anindya, and a couple outsourced testers. We're looking to hire a couple more developers in the next few months.

6. How has FBPay been received in the market? How many people have started using FBPayto sell their events or objects on Facebook?

We were fortunate to have some of the best early adopter beta customers last year. They immediately understood what we were trying to achieve with FBPay and loved it. This drove us to build more and iterate based on their constant feedback. Today, we have a strong customer retention rate (above 75%) who generally enjoy the product for its simplicity and we've gotten a couple nice comments about our customer support.

Currently, we have over 200 sellers in India (mainly NCR based) who are actively using FBPay to sell out their events online.

7. What are the options that the user has to pay to Facebook to make a purchase. I must compliment you on the so many flexible options.

After conducting extensive research we realized that there are 3 key categories which could define purchases online - Multiple pricing which can be used for ticketing, Open collections for Donations  or crowd funding and single value which can be used to sell one priced ticket at a time.

8. Once an event is created on FBPay it is automatically listed on the events tab of Facebook. What technology have you used?

We use the CodeIgnitor framework for our application, MySQL for our database, and jQuery for interactions. We integrate with Facebook using their PHP and JS SDKs, and integrate with payment gateways to provide the online payment facility.

9. What are some of the compliments that you have received for designing FBPay. What compliment do you cherish the most?

We love it when we are introducing FBPay to a prospective client and they say...that's it? is it really that easy? After this realization, we find customers start to run wild and think about all of the different ways they can use FBPay to build their business. Often in ways we never thought of.

That just shows we are on the right track to achieve what we aimed for. We are still new and learning and all our clients are like a milestone. From all smileys to wooohoo mails everything is cherished equally.

But the best compliment is no compliment. When a user finds us, logs in, sets up a sale, makes some money, gets the deposit in their account, and then goes on to setup another sale all without ever speaking a word to us. That's an amazing compliment in the Indian market where users are so accustomed to being sold services or only trusting products that they know personally.

10. When you are not working on FBPay, how do you unwind? What do you find most relaxing?

We convert our communal working desk into a table tennis table whenever we can. In fact, we have an active Google doc which keep scores and we take it very VERY seriously. We also eat a lot and watch many funny YouTube videos together. Oh and we take walks around our office and drink fresh juice a lot, like every day.

11. What are your future plans as far as the development of FBPay is concerned? Are you planning to add any new features to it?

Quite a few! Our plans are first and foremost to keep growing and get more people selling online and building their businesses through FBPay. Now that we have some happy customers, we'd love to spread the love across India to start off.

Concurrent to growth we are working on constantly offering more, from small additions to match market competitors like discount codes for tickets and theme customization, to much bigger disruptive feature sets. We're most interested in building a deeper, more intelligent integration into social media tools that leverages all that rich data to promote and convert sales for our customers.

12. What advice would you like to pass on as an entrepreneur to the budding and aspiring generation of entrepreneurs?

Although it's great to "fail fast", it is also important to have patience - to let users understand your idea, to evolve your concept to the right product, and to let people see the value in what you are creating. In addition, it's important to stay very close to your users, and speak to them whenever there's an opportunity - so that you can evolve your product to address their pain points and help them succeed with you. Creating real value that is relevant for users takes time, and at times can be harder than just doing things that make money, but in the long term the value created always pays off more.

Thank you team for taking out the time and doing this interview with us. We'd like to wish your guys all the best for the future.

Stay tuned with E-junkie for more of such inspirational product stories.