Guide

How to accept card payments without a terminal in Canada (2026)

Last updated: July 24, 2026

First, ignore the headline rate

Almost every comparison of payment providers is a list of percentages, and almost every one of them is misleading. Two things matter more:

The shape of the cost, not just its size. A $50 monthly fee and a 3% per-sale fee are not comparable numbers — they are different kinds of number. If you turn over $20,000 a month, $50 is nothing. If you trade twenty weekends a year, $50 a month is $600 a year charged largely against months you did not trade. Work out your own annual total under each model before comparing rates.

The fixed per-transaction fee. Card processing in Canada typically carries a fixed charge — often around 30 cents — on top of the percentage. On a $50.00 sale that is invisible. On a $4 coffee it is most of the cost. If your average ticket is small, the fixed fee decides your real rate, not the percentage anyone advertises.

Rates and fees change, and every provider publishes its own. Nothing below quotes a competitor's current pricing, because by the time you read it the figure may be wrong. Check each provider's own pricing page before you decide.

Option 1: A mobile card reader

Square, SumUp, Helcim and Stripe all sell small Bluetooth or standalone readers that pair with a phone. You buy the hardware once — usually for tens of dollars rather than a rental contract — and pay a percentage per tap.

Good for: anywhere you want contactless tap, and anywhere customers may not have a smartphone. Tap is still the fastest checkout there is, and a reader accepts Interac debit, which online methods generally cannot.

Trade-offs: it is a device. It needs charging, it can be left at home, it can be dropped, and it will eventually need replacing. Some providers pair readers with monthly software plans for the features you actually want, so check whether the advertised rate is the whole story.

Option 2: Tap to Pay on your phone

Newer than the rest and genuinely clever: several providers now let a customer tap their card or phone directly against your phone, with no separate reader at all. Availability varies by provider, phone model and operating system version, so confirm your own handset is supported before you plan around it.

Good for: the speed of tap with none of the hardware. For a single operator with a modern phone it is close to ideal.

Trade-offs:it ties checkout to your personal phone — battery, handing it to a customer, and only one sale at a time. Device support is narrower than a reader's.

Option 3: Payment links

You generate a URL for a specific amount and send it by text, email or WhatsApp. The customer taps it and pays on a hosted checkout page. Stripe, Square, PayPal and most invoicing tools offer some version of this.

Good for: anything not paid face to face — remote work, deposits taken over the phone, an invoice settled from an office. There is no hardware and no in-person moment at all.

Trade-offs:awkward at a counter, because sending a link to someone standing in front of you means getting their number first. And a link sitting in someone's inbox is easy to forget, which is why payment links alone still involve chasing.

Option 4: QR codes

A printed code encoding your payment URL. The customer points a camera at it and pays in their browser. It is the same hosted-checkout technology as a payment link, with the delivery problem solved for in-person sales: the code is already on your counter.

Good for: service windows, market tables, salon chairs, and any invoice you want to hand over as paper. No hardware to charge, several customers can scan the same code at once, and there is nothing for them to install.

Trade-offs:the customer needs a smartphone with a camera and a connection. A debit card carrying only the Interac logo will not work, though Visa Debit and Debit Mastercard will. And a printed code can be physically covered by someone else's — worth a glance at the start of each shift. The detailed explainer on QR payments covers both points properly.

Option 5: Interac e-Transfer

Worth including because so many Canadian small businesses genuinely run on it. The customer sends money from their bank app to your email address. It is cheap or free depending on your bank, and the money is yours quickly.

Good for: low volumes of larger, invoiced amounts where you and the customer already trust each other.

Trade-offs:it is not a card payment, so a customer who wants to pay by card cannot. It is manual — you match transfers to invoices yourself, and you find out you have been paid by checking. Banks apply their own sending limits, which larger invoices can exceed. It also depends on the customer remembering, which is why “can you send that e-transfer?” is such a familiar text message.

A worked comparison on a real sales pattern

Take a vendor doing $50.00 average sales, twenty market days a year, six sales a day. That is 120 sales and $6,000.00 of annual turnover.

• Percentage-only pricing at PayLeaf's rates costs $2.00 per sale, so $240.00 for the year, and nothing in the months you do not trade.
• Any model with a fixed monthly component adds twelve months of that charge to whatever its per-sale rate comes to. At $30 a month that is $360 a year before the first sale; at $50 it is $600.
• Hardware is usually a one-off purchase, which amortises fine if you keep it for years — and badly if the model you bought stops being supported.

Run the same arithmetic on your own numbers and the answer often flips. At $20,000 a month the fixed fee stops mattering and a small difference in percentage becomes the whole decision. Low volume punishes fixed costs; high volume punishes high percentages. There is no single winner, which is why comparison articles that declare one are not being straight with you.

Five questions to ask before you commit

1. How long is the contract, and what does leaving cost? Month-to-month with no exit fee is very different from a three-year terminal lease.
2. Who holds the money, and for how long? Some providers settle to your bank in a day or two; others hold funds longer or reserve a portion. Ask specifically.
3. What happens on a refund? Whether the original processing fee comes back to you varies by provider, and it matters if you refund often.
4. What is the fee on your actual average ticket? Not on $100 — on the amount you really charge most often. Do the division yourself.
5. What breaks the setup? A dead battery, no venue wifi, a customer without a smartphone. Know which failure applies to you and whether you can live with it.

Where PayLeaf sits, honestly

PayLeaf is the QR-and-invoice option: a free app with no monthly fee, no hardware, and 0.5% plus standard Stripe processing per card payment, plus a flat 1.5% pay-by-bank route on invoices of $250 or more. Stripe holds and pays out the money, not PayLeaf, and payouts land in your own bank account in roughly two business days. The whole fee schedule, with worked examples, is on the pricing page.

It is a good fit if your obstacle is hardware and fixed monthly cost — weekend market sellers, food trucks, contractors invoicing on site, single-chair salons, freelancers who want the invoice to collect itself.

It is the wrong tool if you need Interac debit acceptance, if you are running a high-volume queue where tap speed decides your throughput, or if you want an integrated till with inventory and staff management. In those cases a reader or a full point-of-sale system is the better buy, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If you are still weighing it up, the FAQ answers the fee, payout and refund questions in detail.