Commerce EBS Payment Gateway

Commerce EBS implements the E-Billing Solutions gateway in Drupal Commerce. It was created in the same week as the CCAvenue module, for the same reason and against the same gap: Indian merchants running Drupal Commerce had no supported way to take money from Indian customers.

The gateway's coverage is the interesting part, because it explains why one adapter was never going to be enough. EBS handled Visa, Mastercard and Diners credit cards; debit cards across roughly ten banks including Axis, HDFC, ICICI, SBI and Citibank; net banking through a separate set of banks; and ITZ cash cards. Each of those is a different flow with different failure modes, and a merchant chose their processor partly on which of them their customers actually used. CCAvenue and EBS were competitors, so supporting both meant an Indian Drupal Commerce site could pick on price and coverage rather than on which one happened to have a module.

It reached a stable 7.x-1.0 in November 2012 after a dev release that summer, and that was the end of it. drupal.org reports no current usage — Drupal 7 is end-of-life, Drupal Commerce moved on, and EBS itself was absorbed into a larger payments group. Listing it here with that stated plainly is more useful than pretending otherwise.

The design lesson survived the module. Two competing processors serving the same market, each with its own idea of a transaction, is precisely the argument for keeping payment providers behind one internal interface — which is how the platforms I build now handle a far longer list of them.