Taking payment when you have no website

What you are actually choosing between

Four shapes cover almost every no-website business, and they are not alternatives so much as different answers to "where is the customer when they pay".

• The customer is in front of you — a market stall, a delivery, a home visit. This is ordinary counter acceptance on a portable terminal, and it is the cheapest and lowest-risk of the four because the card is present.
• The customer is on their phone, somewhere else — a payment link or a hosted checkout page you send them. No website required: the page is your provider's, not yours.
• The customer is on the phone to you — the highest-risk shape, because somebody is reading card numbers aloud. Handle it with a link rather than by typing their card into anything.
• The customer scans — a QR at the point of handover, which for many small Singapore sellers is the most natural of the four. See QR payments for which codes are which.

Most no-website businesses need two of these rather than one, and the pair is usually "in front of me" plus "a link I can send".

What changes when the card is not in front of you

This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that costs money later. A remote sale is card not present, and three things change at once:

1. It is priced differently. Card-not-present is structurally more expensive than card-present, and that is not a negotiating position — see how fees are built.
2. The dispute position moves. On a card-present sale the card and often the cardholder were there. On a remote one, your evidence is what you kept — the message thread, the delivery record, the agreed terms. Merchants who keep those routinely spend very little time on disputes; merchants who go looking afterwards spend a lot.
3. Your provider needs to know. A shop that opened a merchant account as a counter business and has quietly become half remote has changed its risk profile without telling anyone. That is a conversation worth having before it is noticed rather than after.

Stop taking payment into a personal account

This is where most no-website businesses start and it is the single most worthwhile thing to change. A personal transfer for a business sale creates four problems at once, and none of them shows up on the day:

• Your business income and your own money are in one place, which your accountant will eventually have to separate, at your cost.
• There is no transaction record in a form that survives — a chat screenshot is not one.
• You have no position at all if the customer later says they did not receive what they paid for.
• You cannot accept a card, which means you cannot accept a customer who wanted to use one.

A merchant account is not only about cards. It is the thing that makes money arriving in your business a recorded, reconcilable event — which is what turns a side operation into something a bank, an accountant or a buyer can look at. See applying for a merchant account.

The three things to get right on day one

1. The descriptor. What appears on the customer's statement should resemble the name they bought from. If you trade on Instagram as one name and your registered entity is another, a customer looking at their statement six weeks later will not recognise it — and an unrecognised line is a chargeback filed by an honest person. Check it on a real statement, once.
2. A record you can find. Whatever you use has to leave you able to answer "what was this payment, from whom, for what" eight months later without scrolling a chat history.
3. One place the money lands. Multiple methods settling into multiple accounts is a daily reconciliation cost you will pay forever. Ask about it before you sign, not after — settlement and reconciliation.