Which payment methods should a Singapore merchant accept?

Start from who is standing at your counter

The right method list is decided by your customers, not by the length of a provider’s feature page. Spend ten minutes watching a normal shift and writing down what people actually reach for; that list beats any comparison table, and it will eliminate most of the market before you speak to anyone.

Location does most of the work. A heartland mall, the CBD at lunchtime, an attraction, and a Chinatown or Bugis shopfront have visibly different queues, and the difference is mostly in wallets rather than cards.

Then ask what a missing method costs. A customer who cannot pay the way they intended will usually find another way — but a queue of them will not, and a tourist without a local card sometimes simply cannot.

Cards: the six schemes

Card acceptance in Singapore means six schemes in practice: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay, Diners Club and Discover. The first two are non-negotiable. American Express is worth enabling wherever corporate or higher-spend customers appear. UnionPay matters wherever Chinese visitors do, and it is frequently the one merchants forget.

Physically, "card" now means three things at the terminal — contactless tap, chip and insert, and magnetic stripe — plus phone wallets riding the same rails. A terminal that takes all of them handles a customer with a ten-year-old card and one with only a phone without staff having to think about it.

Uniweb Pay enables all six schemes on one merchant account, and the Sunmi P3 takes contactless, chip and insert, magnetic stripe and QR wallets on the same device.

Wallets: Apple Pay, Google Pay, and the Chinese pair

Apple Pay and Google Pay are not separate decisions in the way people expect — they ride card rails, so a terminal that takes contactless takes them. What is a genuine decision is Alipay+ and WeChat Pay, because those are separate enablements on your merchant account and not every provider offers them.

Alipay+ is the cross-border gateway rather than mainland Alipay alone: one enablement reaches mainland Alipay users and a set of partner wallets from other Asian markets. WeChat Pay is enabled separately. UnionPay is worth having as both a card scheme and a QR rail, since Chinese customers use both.

The question to ask is not "can you support Alipay" but "does it sit on the same merchant account and the same device as my cards". A wallet product running beside a card terminal settles separately, reports separately and reconciles separately — every day, indefinitely.

QR: PayNow, and what it replaces

PayNow is Singapore’s real-time transfer rail, and for a merchant the important distinction is not whether you have it but which form. A static PayNow sticker has no amount in it: the shopper types the figure and you verify by looking at a screenshot. A dynamic PayNow QR is generated per sale, carries the exact amount, and returns a payment-success notification to you.

SGQR is a third thing again — a unified label standard that lets several schemes share one printed square. It is about presentation, not about what the merchant sees when a payment lands. Uniweb Pay offers Dynamic PayNow and does not offer SGQR.

This is covered properly in the PayNow and SGQR guide, including a side-by-side table and what to test when a provider demonstrates their QR.

Online and in-app: the same decision, different plumbing

The method list barely changes online; the plumbing does. A website needs a checkout that takes cards and QR — with Uniweb Pay that is a hosted checkout page — and a mobile app needs an SDK so payment happens inside the app rather than bouncing the customer to a browser.

What is worth insisting on is that all three channels sit on one merchant account. In-store, online and in-app on a single account means one SGD payout, one portal and one statement instead of three of each, and it is the difference between a daily reconciliation that takes minutes and one that takes an hour.

If you sell across channels, ask any provider directly whether a customer buying online and a customer buying at the counter appear in the same reporting view. The answer is not always yes.

A method-by-method summary

What Uniweb Pay enables

Eleven methods on one merchant account: six card schemes (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay, Diners Club, Discover), four wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Alipay+, WeChat Pay) and one QR rail (Dynamic PayNow). The same set applies in store, online and in-app, settling into a single SGD payout in T+1 batches.

SGQR is not offered, and that is a real limit rather than an omission. Rates are quoted per merchant rather than published, and settlement is SGD only — both worth weighing before you get as far as a method list.

The merchant portal shows the split by payment method against your GMV trend, so after a month you can see which enablements are actually earning their place. Transactions filter by outlet or method and export to Excel.