Sending money to India is not as difficult as like receiving money from India. A simple google search will make you flooded with options, which could be really confusing for a normal user who wants to send his earning to his family or associates back in India. A user is obligated to choose his payment service provider based on the volume of money, country which receives money, and how fast he wants to make the payment happen, currencies involved in transfers etc. Because of the increase in cross border payments there are many providers who just provide cheap services for specific country, or currency. Some of the common methods used to send money to India are:
Bank Transfers / Wire Transfers
Bank transfers are the widely used method to send payments to India. It is one of the industry accepted way of B2B money transfers to India, even though it is a costly option of smaller payments which are less than 100,000 Euro. First, no matter what, the size of the payment is, they charge 30 Euro SWIFT transfer fee. Then, if the mid market rate (standard FX rate) is 73 rupees, the banks never provide it. They take down 3-6 % as currency conversion fee, and provide the remaining around 69.75 rupees as bank sell rate. The bank sell rate might improve incase are doing bulk transactions. So the exporters are highly affected losing their 80% of profit margin in currency conversion alone.
Western Union
Even though Western Union is costly service when compared to other providers, due to availability of wide network of agents in India, Western Union , stays a preference of choice to send money to India. To the large sector of India, who don't have any access to banking facilities, or areas with less smartphone or digital banking facilities, pick centers or express delivery serves as a primary option to receive money from abroad.
Transferwise
Transferwise seems to be a better option while comparing to other freely available options in the market. Payments less than 5000 Euros are beneficial for using transferwise. They provide the midmarket rate and there is no currency conversion fee involved. But there is a transferwise fee included, and that is how they make their money.
Payoneer
Payoneer tries to be the one stop solution for receiving b2b payments from India, and they are said to have transparent pricing. But as Payoneer provides a large number of services, and each and every service has its own pricing. To make it simple, they charge 2% on FX rates on top of mid market rate, for receiving payments from foreign currency. The credit card rates differ, much depends on the country and currencies.
Paypal
Due to universal acceptance and as paypal managed to convince its customers to be a secure way of payment transfers, it is still widely in use. Small scale freelancers from India still use Paypal as their gateway to receive funds from their overseas customers. Paypal charges 3-4 in processing charge and 4-5 in currency conversion fee. Hence an exporter or service provider easily looses 7-9 percent just to receive his funds.