Did you know you can take remote payments using Zettle? In this article I’m taking a look at the ‘Pay-by-Link’ feature. Is it any good and how can it benefit your business? This is great for businesses who are used to taking face-to-face payments who are rapidly evolving their business model to handle more remote ways of working. In this article I’ll step you through taking remote payments from customers.

Payment Links or ‘Pay-by-Link’ is a feature in Zettle that allows you to take remote payments from customers via SMS text message or a link shared by e-mail, social media etc. It’s effectively a very simple remote invoicing system and should work brilliantly for businesses who can adapt to remote working. Whether this means delivering goods to customers or providing other services without the customer being physically present.

1. Within the Zettle Go app click on the menu icon in the top left of the screen and click ‘Payment Links’:

Zettle Payment Links
Within the Zettle app click Payment Links from the main menu

2. The first time you use Payment Links you’ll need to activate the service. Just click the ‘Activate’ button. When I tried this the service seemed to activate immediately. I’m not sure whether this is normal or why it’s not activated by default. Either way, it seemed to work fine:

Zettle Payment Links
Active Payment Links

3. Add your website address. I’m not sure what they mean by “we need to know what you sell” as there’s nowhere to enter this information. I just entered my website address and it worked fine:

Zettle Payment Links
Add a link to your website

4. Charge your customer as normal, either using the ‘Amount’ or ‘Product’ method. You’ll need to make sure you enter a Description if you’re using the Amount method:

Zettle Payment Links
Charge your customer as normal

5. Select ‘Send link’ as the payment option. Only select ‘Card’ if the cardholder is actually physically present and you want to take a normal face-to-face card payment:

Zettle Payment Links
Select ‘Send link’ as the payment method

6. Select ‘Share with SMS’ to send the payment link by text message. Alternatively just click the ‘Share’ button if you’d rather do it by e-mail or social media. This provides you with a unique URL that can be shared with the customer:

Zettle Payment Links
Select whether to send it by text or e-mail

7. You can manage payment links you’ve sent via the ‘Payment links’ option in the main menu (step 1). From there if you click ‘UNPAID’ you can see payment links you’ve created that haven’t been paid yet:

Zettle Payment Links
Payment links can be managed in the Payment Links menu

8. From that you can re-share the existing link or delete it completely if it’s no longer required:

Zettle Payment Links
You can re-share or delete the link from there too

Update yours T’s & C’s!

If your business has dedicated Terms & Conditions of Sale make sure you update them to cater for remote payments. You may want to consider adding consequences for customers who pay late or fail to pay completely. You should already have these in place if you accept invoice payments (do you?) so a minor wording change should suffice. If you’re used to accepting face-to-face payments without T’s & C’s then I would suggest putting these in place ASAP. You may also want to take a look at distance selling regulations to see whether these are likely to have an impact as a result of remote trading.

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Last Updated on 3 April 2020 by Andy Mac