PayLeafExplainer
QR code payments in Canada: how they work and what they cost
Last updated: July 24, 2026
QR code payments have gone from novelty to normal in Canada in a few short years, mostly because they solve a problem small vendors actually have: taking a card without owning a card machine. This is a plain explanation of what is happening technically when someone scans your code, what each sale costs you, and where the approach genuinely does not fit.
A QR code is not a payment method
This is the single most useful thing to understand, because it clears up most of the confusion. A QR code is not a payment rail, a network or a currency. It is a picture of a web address. Encode https://example.com/pay/abc123 into a grid of black squares and you have a QR code — that is the entire trick.
So when a customer “pays by QR” in Canada, what actually happens is: their camera reads a URL, their browser opens that URL, and a normal secure checkout page loads. The payment itself is an ordinary card payment, processed by an ordinary payment processor. The QR code replaced the step where the customer would otherwise have had to type an address, tap a link, or hand over a card.
That is different from how QR payments work in some other countries. China's WeChat Pay and Alipay, India's UPI and Brazil's Pix run QR codes over national account-to-account schemes, where scanning moves money directly between bank accounts through a domestic network. Canada has no consumer-facing equivalent. Interac e-Transfer is the closest domestic rail, and it was not designed as a merchant checkout — it is a person-to-person transfer that happens to get used for business.
The practical consequence: in Canada, a QR checkout is a card checkout with a nicer front door. Everything you know about card acceptance — processing fees, settlement times, chargebacks — still applies.
What happens, step by step
Using PayLeaf as the worked example, though the shape is the same for any QR checkout built on a hosted payment page:
- You get a code. It encodes a URL unique to your business. A static code is printed once and reused for every sale. A dynamic code is generated for one specific amount — one invoice, one order — and encodes that total.
- The customer scans it. On any current iPhone or Android phone the built-in camera app recognises QR codes with no extra software. There is nothing for the customer to install and no account for them to create.
- A hosted checkout opens.The browser loads a payment page hosted by the payment processor — for PayLeaf that is Stripe. The amount is shown, and for a dynamic code it is fixed and not editable, which removes the “customer typed $9 instead of $90” failure mode.
- They pay.Card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Card details go from the customer's phone directly to the processor. They never pass through the vendor's app or phone.
- You are told. The processor confirms the payment, the sale or invoice is marked paid, and the money is scheduled for payout to your bank account.
What it actually costs per sale
Percentages on their own are close to useless here, because of one detail: card processing includes a fixed per-transaction fee — commonly 30 cents in Canada — on top of a percentage. On a large sale that fixed portion disappears into the noise. On a $5 sale it is the dominant cost.
The table below uses PayLeaf's own pricing (0.5% to PayLeaf plus Stripe's standard 2.9% + 30¢ on a domestic Canadian card) so the numbers are concrete rather than illustrative. Every figure is computed from the same code that charges the fee.
| Sale | Card fee | Effective rate | Bank fee | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5.00 | $0.48 | 9.6% | — | — |
| $20.00 | $0.98 | 4.9% | — | — |
| $60.00 | $2.34 | 3.9% | — | — |
| $250.00 | $8.80 | 3.5% | $5.00 | 2.0% |
| $1,000.00 | $34.30 | 3.4% | $15.00 | 1.5% |
Read the effective-rate column and the lesson is obvious: a $5.00 QR sale costs you 9.6% and a $1,000.00 one costs 3.4%. If your average ticket is very small, the fixed 30 cents is your real enemy, and the fix is batching — one payment for a customer's whole order rather than three separate scans.
The bank column is a different rail: a pre-authorized debit from the customer's bank account rather than a card. It skips card processing entirely, which is why it lands at a flat 1.5%, but it takes three to five business days to clear and PayLeaf only offers it on invoices of $250.00 or more. Full detail and a calculator are on the pricing page.
Security: the good and the genuinely risky
The good part is real. Because the customer pays on a page hosted by the processor, the vendor never touches card data. There is no card number in your app, on your phone, or in a notebook behind the counter. For a small business this removes an entire category of liability — you cannot leak what you never held.
The genuine risk is physical, and it is worth taking seriously: a printed QR code can be covered up. Someone can stick their own code over yours, and customers who scan it will be sent to a page that is not yours. This has happened to parking meters and restaurant tables in several countries. The defences are simple and worth building into a habit:
- Glance at your codes at the start of each shift or market day. A sticker over a sticker is easy to spot once you are looking.
- Laminate or frame codes rather than taping loose paper, so tampering takes effort and leaves evidence.
- Know what your own payment page looks like — your business name should be on it — so you can tell a customer what to expect.
- Reconcile at the end of the day. Takings that do not match the sales you served is the signal that something is wrong.
The other honest caveat is a Canadian one: a debit card carrying only the Interac logo will not work at a QR checkout, because Interac debit runs on a domestic network that is not available for this kind of online payment. Cards that also run on Visa or Mastercard — Visa Debit and Debit Mastercard, which most Canadian banks now issue — do work, along with credit cards and the phone wallets. In practice this is rarely a problem, but it is not never.
Where QR wins, and where it does not
QR is strongest where hardware is the obstacle. A food truck window where passing a terminal through a hatch is awkward. A market stall that trades twenty weekends a year and cannot justify a monthly contract. A contractor who wants the invoice and the payment to be the same piece of paper. A single chair in a salon. In all of those the alternative is cash-only, and cash-only is a ceiling on your takings.
It is weaker in a few specific places. A high-volume queue where speed is everything is still better served by contactless tap, which is faster than any scan. A customer without a smartphone cannot scan anything. And if your average sale is a couple of dollars, the fixed per-transaction fee makes card acceptance of any kind expensive — that is not a QR problem, but QR does not fix it either.
The reasonable conclusion is not that QR replaces everything. It is that for a large number of Canadian small vendors, the honest comparison is not “QR versus a terminal” but “QR versus turning away customers who have no cash.” Framed that way the decision is usually easy.
If you want to see the mechanics rather than read about them, PayLeaf does exactly this — QR code payments in Canada with no terminal, no monthly fee, and the fee math published in full. The wider comparison of no-terminal options covers the alternatives fairly if you are still weighing them up.