Offline card transaction value down 17% this festive season as users shop online

Card spending offline declines

Offline credit card transaction value fell by 16 percent during the 2025 festive season compared to last year, as consumers shifted to shop more online, data from the Reserve Bank of India showed.

The decline in debit card spending at offline outlets was even steeper at 29 percent, indicating that some of the spending has moved to quick commerce as well as popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platforms.

The decline of offline spending

The offline spending with credit cards stood at Rs 47,626 crore for September this year, compared with Rs 57,121 crore during October 2024, with Dusshera falling in October last year.

The debit card spend at offline outlets stood at Rs 19,726 crore this September, compared with Rs 27,589 crore in October last year.

During August 2025, the credit card spending at offline outlets stood at Rs 47,176 crore.

With the new reduced GST rates came into effect from September 22, the offline credit card transaction value barely managed to cross the August figure, while for debit card, the transaction value was even lower than august.

Online shining

The September figures for online transactions, however, are a new record for credit card spending, as Moneycontrol had reported on September 29.

Flipkart’s Big Billion Day and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival drove credit card spending on e-commerce platforms to an all-time high in September 2025, at Rs 1.18 lakh crore. The online credit card spending also crossed Rs 10,000 crore in a day for the first time on September 22, when the top two e-commerce platforms kicked off their festival shopping bonanza. It was also the first day of the 10-day Navaratri festival.

UPI disappoints as well

While some of the low-value offline transactions have moved to UPI, the mobile payment platform’s transaction volume was lower in September than in August, even after the boost from GST and online festive sales, with the transaction value growing marginally by 0.2 percent.

With the scale of UPI, one less day in a month often results in lower figures for UPI transaction data.

The Dusshera sale events' discounts are driven by card payments. On a normal day, for Flipkart or Amazon, UPI transactions may be higher, but on sale event days people prefer card payments for the associated offers.

UPI is too big for online sales events to impact

Interestingly, the UPI volume and value figures for the first half of September were at least 25 percent higher than those of the days after September 22, when the GST reform kicked in.

For instance, September 22 recorded the second-lowest transaction volume for the month. During the first 10 days of September, UPI volumes were around 670 million transactions per day, which came down to 640 million during the online sale days. Similarly, the daily value of transactions usually crosses a lakh crore during the first few days, whereas it was around Rs 80,000 crore during the sale days.

In fact, the typical online credit card spending of Rs 95,000 crore in a month, a figure that UPI matches in a day.