Accepting E-Transfers for Online Orders

Customers who would rather not type a card number

A customer reaches the checkout, sees the card form and stops. Then an email arrives asking whether they can pay by e-transfer instead.

Plenty of Canadians are more comfortable sending an Interac e-Transfer from their own online banking than entering a card number on a site they found an hour ago. Some have no credit card at all.

Small shops usually say yes and handle it by hand: a reply with an email address, a note on a pad, a search through the bank account a few days later.

That works for three orders a month. It falls apart at thirty, when payments arrive under names that match no order and stock sits reserved for people who changed their minds.

Why customers choose it

• No card details are entered on your website.
• It comes from their own bank, which they already trust.
• No extra account or app is needed.
• It suits customers without a credit card, or near its limit.
• It is familiar from paying friends, landlords and sports clubs.

The first matters most to a cautious buyer. They do not have to decide whether your site is safe to type a card into, only whether your business is real.

Make it a real option at checkout

Most shop software has a manual payment method meant for bank transfers or cheques. It can usually be renamed and given its own instructions.

Name it plainly, as Interac e-Transfer, and give those orders a status that means unpaid: on hold, awaiting payment, or whatever your software calls it.

The order is recorded, the stock is reserved, and nothing ships until the money is in. E-transfer orders then sit in the same list as every other order, instead of on a pad by the till.

Instructions that leave nothing to guess

The customer needs the same instructions in three places: at checkout, on the confirmation page and in the order email.

Give the email address to send to, the exact total, and the order number to type in the transfer's message. Say how long the order will be held, and what happens if payment does not arrive.

Then the security question. The sender chooses a question and an answer, and you need the answer to deposit the money.

Ask customers to send the answer separately, by email or through your contact form, and never to put it in the transfer's own message.

A worked example

A small flour mill grinds heritage wheat and rye on a stone mill and sells bags of flour online to home bakers across the province.

Many of its customers asked to pay by e-transfer. The owner agreed by email, noted each promise on a printed order list and checked the bank account when there was time.

Payments arrived from a spouse's account with a different surname, or with no message at all. Bags from a small run of rye were set aside for orders never paid, while paying customers were told it had sold out.

The fix was mostly configuration. E-transfer became a named payment option, those orders went on hold automatically, and the order email carried the address, the total and the order number to quote.

The owner now checks the on-hold orders each morning: a reminder on the second business day, cancellation on the third. Cancelled rye goes back on sale the same morning.

Matching payments to orders

The order number in the message is what makes matching quick. Without it, you are guessing from a name and an amount.

Check once a day, at the same time, in your online banking rather than your inbox. Deposit each transfer, find the order, mark it paid and send the email saying it is being packed.

Watch for payments that do not fit: a partial amount, two orders paid together, a name you do not recognise. A short email asking which order it belongs to is quicker than a wrong parcel.

Check the bank, not the email

The notification email is a convenience, not proof of payment.

Fake e-transfer notifications are a common phishing email, with links to pages imitating a bank's sign-in. A payment is real when it appears in your account after you have signed in to your bank directly.

For the same reason, never ship on the strength of a forwarded notification or a screenshot from the customer.

Holding stock fairly

An order on hold reserves stock that a paying customer might want. Decide how long you will hold it, and say so at checkout.

Two or three business days suits most shops. That is long enough for someone who orders on a Friday night to pay on Monday, and short enough that limited stock is not tied up for a week.

Send one reminder before cancelling. When you cancel, put the stock back that day, and tell the customer politely that the order has lapsed and can be placed again.

Limits, fees and refunds

Banks limit how much a customer can send, so a large order may have to be paid over more than one day, or by a different method. Say so on the checkout page for big orders.

Some bank accounts charge a fee for each transfer sent or received. Check yours before deciding whether e-transfer orders pay the same price as card orders.

Refunds go back by e-transfer too, which means you will need to share a security answer with the customer by a separate route.

The counter-case

E-transfer suits shops whose customers are almost all in Canada. Customers elsewhere cannot use it, so it can only sit beside a card option, never replace it.

It is also slower. Nothing ships until someone checks the bank, which does not suit perishable goods or same-day dispatch.

And a shop with hundreds of orders a week may find that matching payments by hand costs more staff time than card fees. At that point the card checkout itself deserves the work.

For most small Canadian shops, a named e-transfer option with clear instructions and a firm holding period is worth adding.

Setting it up

1. Rename the manual payment method to Interac e-Transfer.
2. Set unpaid orders to on hold.
3. Write the instructions for checkout, confirmation and email.
4. Ask for the order number in the transfer message.
5. Check your bank at the same time daily.
6. Remind once, then cancel on a stated day.
7. Return cancelled stock to sale immediately.

Step four is what makes the rest manageable. Without an order number in the message, every payment becomes a small investigation, and a daily check that should take five minutes takes an hour.

The rest of the checkout deserves the same Canadian test, covered in checkout forms that reject Canadian postal codes.

Frequently asked questions

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