eSewa or Khalti? A Kathmandu Developer's Take on Nepal's Payment Gateways

Based in Kathmandu, Nepal, every e-commerce or booking website we build eventually runs into the same question: eSewa or Khalti? In practice, most successful platforms integrate both, because customers already have a strong preference for one or the other and forcing a single option costs you sales.

eSewa has the largest installed user base in Nepal and is often the default choice for older, more established customer segments. Its API is well documented and stable, and reconciliation reports are straightforward to pull for accounting purposes.

Khalti has gained significant ground with younger, mobile-first users and offers a slightly smoother checkout experience on mobile devices, along with features like Khalti EMI for larger purchases. Its developer documentation has improved substantially over the past few years.

From an integration standpoint, both use token or signature based verification flows, and both require handling edge cases properly: payment timeouts, user-abandoned transactions, and webhook retries. We have seen real production issues arise not from the initial 'happy path' integration, which is easy, but from failure handling that was never tested, leaving order records stuck in a pending state.

Our recommendation for most e-commerce or booking platforms in Nepal is to integrate both eSewa and Khalti from day one, plus a manual bank transfer or cash-on-delivery fallback if your business model supports it. This maximizes conversion because you are not asking customers to create an account with a provider they do not already use.