OTP-Based Purchase Order Locking for High Traffic Payment Systems
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Solution Overview
Problem
High online traffic during sale periods can lead to delayed or failed payment transactions, resulting in negative customer experiences and potential loss of business for merchants, as existing systems struggle to handle increased loads effectively.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a method that uses One-Time Passwords (OTPs) to lock online purchase orders during high traffic periods, allowing payment transactions to be processed later when traffic decreases, ensuring customers can complete purchases and merchants can maintain customer satisfaction.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If the merchant site accepts more customers during sale periods, then the number of purchases increases, but the payment transaction system becomes overloaded and transactions fail
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by sending OTPs to customers in advance during high-traffic periods, locking in their purchase intentions and payment methods before the actual payment processing occurs. This allows the system to prepare transaction data and validate customer identities ahead of time, reducing the load on the payment processing system when traffic peaks occur.
Solution Approach 2:
The payment transaction process is segmented into multiple stages: (1) OTP generation and sending to customer, (2) OTP verification and purchase order locking, and (3) actual payment processing. This segmentation allows the system to handle different stages at different times, separating the high-volume OTP verification phase from the lower-volume payment processing phase, thereby preventing system overload.
2Speed
If the system processes payments in real-time during high traffic, then transaction speed is maintained, but transaction failures and timeouts increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary OTP verification and purchase order locking before actual payment processing. This preliminary action validates customer identity and reserves the transaction slot in advance, so that when the actual payment processing occurs, the critical authentication steps have already been completed, reducing the perceived transaction time and improving reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The OTP system acts as an intermediary between the customer and the payment processing system. Instead of directly processing payments during high traffic, the system uses OTP verification as an intermediate step that can be performed asynchronously and at scale, decoupling the authentication process from the payment processing and allowing both to occur at optimal speeds.
3Reliability
If the system locks purchase orders with OTP verification, then transaction reliability improves, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements self-service by automatically generating OTPs, sending them to customers, verifying the OTPs, and locking purchase orders without requiring manual intervention. This automation, while adding components, actually simplifies the overall system by eliminating the need for manual transaction verification and reducing human error, making the complexity manageable through standardized automated processes.
Solution Approach 2:
The OTP system serves multiple functions: (1) customer authentication, (2) purchase order locking, (3) fraud prevention, and (4) transaction timing control. By consolidating these multiple functions into a single OTP verification mechanism, the system reduces overall complexity compared to implementing separate systems for each function, as the OTP becomes a universal key that handles all these tasks.
Data Source
AI summary
A method may include receiving an online purchase request in a merchant interface from an electronic device of a customer. The online purchase request includes payment related information of payment card associated with customer for purchasing an item at a set price. Method includes sending an OTP request to payment server. Method further includes receiving an OTP from payment server, and storing OTP as a merchant OTP. Further, method includes facilitating sending OTP to registered contact identifier of customer. Further, method includes providing an option to customer to input a customer OTP in merchant interface. Thereafter, upon receipt of customer OTP from customer, the method includes locking an online purchase order of item for the set price based on one or more conditions. Payment transaction from payment card is actuated after a time period of locking the online purchase order based on the one or more conditions.