How to Set Up Razorpay: Step-by-Step (2027)

Quick answer: Setting up Razorpay is seven moves: sign up, submit business KYC, add your website with six policy pages and a sample invoice, wait for verification (Razorpay's docs say within 3 working days), generate live API keys, integrate Orders, Checkout and webhooks, then switch from test to live. Payment Links and Invoices work even before your website is approved. Startups can look at Rize and Startup Perks; B2B sellers should pair links with Smart Collect.

How we researched this: We read Razorpay's account-activation, website-details, API-key, capture-settings and integration docs, its pricing, Payment Links, Invoices, Smart Collect, Rize and Startup Perks pages, its KYC onboarding guide, and the RBI Master Direction on Payment Aggregators. All as checked in October 2026; Razorpay's dashboard is the final word on your account.

Before you apply: the paperwork that decides how fast you go live

Razorpay is a payment aggregator, so it must do KYC on you before real money moves. The RBI's Master Direction on Payment Aggregators (15 September 2025) says merchants onboarded from 1 January 2026 must go through its due diligence from the start, and it includes a lighter route for small merchants: if annual turnover is up to ₹40 lakh (or export turnover up to ₹5 lakh), the aggregator may verify the PAN or Form 60, do a physical contact-point verification and take one officially valid document of the proprietor. Razorpay's own pages translate that into a document list.

What Razorpay's account-activation page asks for from the person behind the business:

• Personal PAN of the owner, proprietor, partner or promoter (the page notes it typically has "P" as the fourth letter).
• Aadhaar, front and back, of the same person.
• A contact email, and bank details (account number, account name, IFSC). Registered businesses are told to use their current account.
• The official business name, the GST certificate if you have one, and your average order value (total revenue divided by number of orders).
• Industry-specific licences where they apply, such as FSSAI for food, SEBI for investment advisory or IRDA for insurance.

Razorpay's KYC onboarding guide adds entity-level documents:

The same guide says "exact name matching across all documents is critical", and that the bank account name must match the PAN. Before you apply, put the PAN card, GST certificate and cancelled cheque side by side and check that the spelling, punctuation and "Pvt Ltd" versus "Private Limited" all agree. Categories such as liquor, fertilisers or fireworks need government-approved trade licences plus the standard KYC, and may involve a site visit. If your business is in one of those, expect more paperwork.

The seven steps, in order

1. Create the account. Sign up on Razorpay with your email and mobile number. You can explore the dashboard and test mode straight away.
2. Complete KYC. Upload the documents above. Razorpay's guide describes eKYC (Aadhaar OTP), Video KYC or offline submission; digital routes are faster. Automated checks flag expired documents and name mismatches before a person looks at the file.
3. Add website or app details. In the dashboard open Account & Settings, then Business website detail under Website and app settings, then Add website/app details. For a website you supply the URL and links to six pages: About us, Contact us, Pricing details, Terms and conditions, Privacy policy and Refunds policy. You also upload a sample invoice (PNG, JPG or PDF), and test login credentials if customers must log in to pay. For an app you provide the app URL and test credentials. If your automatic check fails, you can re-enter correct URLs or create policy pages with Razorpay.
4. Wait for verification. In the API-key doc, Razorpay says it verifies website details "within 3 working days". Until then you have no live-mode keys, so you cannot take payments from your site or app; Payment Links and Invoices still work.
5. Generate API keys. Go to Account & Settings, then API Keys, then Generate Key. Test-mode keys need no website. After you generate a key pair, the dashboard shows only the Key ID, not the Key Secret, so download and store the secret immediately; if you lose it you regenerate. Only Owner and Admin roles can see the keys, and regenerating needs an OTP to your registered mobile.
6. Integrate using the Orders API and Standard Checkout, or a plugin (next section).
7. Go live. Swap test keys for live keys, confirm capture settings and set up webhooks. Razorpay's warning is worth taping to a monitor: if you go live with test keys, customers may see a success screen but no payment is captured or settled.

Razorpay's guide says digital KYC can cut onboarding from 3-7 days to 1-3 days for most merchants; treat that vendor claim as a best case that assumes clean, matching documents.

Integrating: an afternoon of developer work

Take a Nagpur pickle brand on a custom PHP site, or a Pune agency building a client's shop. Razorpay's Standard Checkout flow, from its integration docs, has these parts:

• Create an order on your server with the Orders API. Amounts go in paise, so ₹500 is 50000. Payments made without an order_id cannot be captured and are refunded automatically.
• Open Checkout in the browser with your Key ID and the order ID.
• Verify the signature on your server. Checkout returns razorpay_payment_id, razorpay_order_id and razorpay_signature; you compute an HMAC SHA256 of order_id|payment_id with your Key Secret and fulfil the order only if it matches. Razorpay's line: "Always verify the payment signature server-side."
• Capture. By default an authorised payment moves to captured automatically. Auto-capture can be tuned between 12 minutes and 3 days, only the account owner can change it, and payments not captured within 3 days are refunded automatically (the docs describe this refund as taking 5-7 working days).
• Webhooks for events like order.paid are the main asynchronous signal; Razorpay says to rely on them for automation.

Server libraries exist for .NET, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby and Go, and plugins cover WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify. A Payment Button needs no integration at all. If your store is on a platform plugin, you will mostly paste keys; if you have custom code, budget time for signature verification and webhook retries, because those two decide whether you ever ship an order against a failed payment.

B2B collections: links, Smart Collect and invoices

A 25-person Pune industrial-fasteners distributor invoicing retailers in lots of ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh does not need a shopping-cart checkout. It needs "pay this invoice" links and clean reconciliation. Razorpay's pages describe three tools for that "b2b payment link gateway software" job:

• Payment Links. Create a link in the dashboard and send it by SMS, email or WhatsApp; the page also lists partial payments (customers can pay in instalments, upfront or as an advance), bulk creation by uploading a CSV or XLSX, webhooks per transaction and an API. Per Razorpay's docs, links stay available even without approved website details, so you can start collecting from the dashboard while the website review runs.
• Smart Collect. Gives each customer an identifier so bank transfers (UPI, IMPS, NEFT, RTGS) are matched to the right payer automatically. Razorpay says that in Smart Collect 2.0 the identifiers link to your own current or escrow account, funds are collected directly into it, and it supports whitelisted-payer checks. The page lists no price, so ask your account manager.
• Razorpay Invoices. GST-compliant invoices with discounts and shipping calculated, email and SMS notification, partial payments, PDF download, reusable line-item templates and webhooks such as invoice.paid and invoice.partially_paid.

One cost point matters for B2B: card payments through the gateway carry the 2% platform fee plus GST per Razorpay's pricing page (checked October 2026), so a ₹5 lakh invoice paid by card costs about ₹10,000 plus ₹1,800 GST. Bank-transfer collection through Smart Collect is the route to ask about for large tickets. Compare it against Cashfree Payment Links (listed as included at no additional cost with the gateway) and Instamojo links (2% + ₹3 per transaction) in our Razorpay vs Cashfree fee comparison, and read how to collect payments faster with reminders and UPI links for the follow-up routine. Paying your own vendors is a different product, RazorpayX; see bulk vendor payouts in India.

Razorpay Rize and Startup Perks: what the startup benefits actually are

Two programmes get conflated, so separate them.

Razorpay Rize is described on Razorpay's own page as an early-stage startup programme with founder communities (Rize Tech+, Rize D2C+ and Rize Xport+), programmes such as Rize for YC and Pitch Perfect, resource libraries and company registration for private limited companies, LLPs and one-person companies through dedicated partners. The registration page advertises "₹1,499 + Govt. Fee", with registration in 7-10 business days excluding government approval time, and lists company PAN and TAN, name approval, MoA and AoA, the incorporation certificate, a digital signature certificate and DIN as included. If you are not yet incorporated, compare that quote and its scope with your CA's before you commit.

Startup Perks is the funded-startup offer. Razorpay's page splits it into Angel Funded and VC Funded tiers:

The page does not publish eligibility rules beyond "funded startups", and every figure carries an asterisk pointing to terms we could not see on the page, so confirm them in writing before you build a budget around them. A bootstrapped Coimbatore exporter would not qualify for the funded tiers and should instead read our guide to startup credits from AWS, Google and Zoho. Separately, Razorpay's pricing page currently shows a sign-up banner for a free payment gateway in the first 90 days, which is not the same thing as Startup Perks.

What it costs, and when Razorpay is the wrong choice

Razorpay's pricing page (checked October 2026) lists a 2% platform fee plus GST on domestic payments, zero setup fee and zero annual maintenance charge, zero MDR on standard UPI and RuPay debit with the platform fee still applying, international cards at up to 3% plus taxes, and custom pricing above ₹5 lakh a month. Settlement is typically T+1 or instant. For product-by-product numbers read our Razorpay pricing guide.

Razorpay may not be the right pick if:

• You are in a restricted category and cannot produce the licence the guide asks for.
• Your recurring billing is mostly UPI AutoPay or e-NACH and you want published rates: Razorpay quotes those on request. See UPI AutoPay vs e-NACH and Razorpay Subscriptions.
• You want a lower headline fee: Cashfree Payments lists 1.95% plus taxes, and PayU lists 2% with T+2 settlement. Our payment gateway category has more.

After go-live, give your accountant the settlement reports from day one so that fees and GST on fees reconcile in Zoho Books or TallyPrime each month. If you issue invoices from the dashboard, see also invoicing software for tools that handle credit notes and e-invoicing.

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