QR transfer or card payment: what should your business choose?

Two ways to get paid: QR transfer and card payment

Imagine you run a lemonade stand. There are two ways someone can hand you money: drop a bill straight into a jar (that's a QR transfer), or run a card through a special terminal wired up to the bank, the cash register, and your computer (that's acquiring). Both bring in money — but they behave very differently, and they suit different kinds of business.

A QR-code transfer (IPS transfer) is the most direct route there is. The customer points their banking app's camera at your QR code and sends money straight to your account with one tap. In the simplest terms: it's as if the person handed you the money directly, just through a phone. No middlemen, almost no fee, the money lands in your account instantly, and it can't be pulled back — so no disputes or chargebacks after the fact. And you can launch it in literally five minutes: no contract with a payment company, no website integration, no checks to pass.

But that simplicity has a flip side. A QR transfer is money that "just shows up on its own." Your website knows nothing about it. In grown-up terms: there's no automatic link between "payment → order," so nobody automatically hands the customer a ticket, access, or product — a real person has to eyeball that the money arrived and confirm everything manually. Put childishly: the bill went into the jar, but the jar can't shout "thanks, your order's ready!" — you have to keep peeking inside to check. On top of that, you can't set up a subscription (so it charges every month on its own), you can't split a single payment between several recipients, and mostly only local, Serbian customers can pay this way — a foreigner or tourist with their own card walks right past.

Card payment through a payment provider (AltaPay, PaySpot, ArbiPay) is the opposite pole. Here your website is hooked up to a "smart terminal" that sees everything and does everything itself. The customer pays — and the site instantly knows and hands over the order on its own. Childishly: it's a magic jar that, the moment a coin drops in, shouts "paid!" and hands the buyer their toy itself. In grown-up terms: you get full automation, subscriptions and recurring charges, acceptance of international cards, proper analytics and dashboards for every transaction, plus the ability to split money between several recipients. This is what grows with you at any volume.

You pay for that convenience — literally: the fee is higher than with a QR transfer. There's a risk of chargebacks, when a customer disputes a payment. And getting it all running takes time: a contract, integration, a business review, and compliance with the PCI DSS security standard.

So who should pick what

If you're just starting out — small flow, one-off sales, selling by hand or offline — a QR transfer covers the job almost for free and without any red tape. At the start it's an honest, working, cheap option, and there's simply no reason to overpay for acquiring.

But the moment you start to grow — you get a website, you want to take payments in a steady stream and automatically, you need statistics, you need subscriptions or splitting payments between recipients — a QR transfer hits a ceiling. Everything that makes a business scalable, it either can't do at all or offloads onto manual labor — and manual labor is exactly what kills growth once the orders pile up. At this stage full card acquiring stops being an "expensive option" and becomes simply a necessity.

In short

• QR transfer (IPS) — cheap, instant, no red tape, but everything's manual, no subscriptions, no split, and mostly for local customers. Ideal at the start.
• Card acquiring — pricier and slower to launch, but everything's automatic: subscriptions, international cards, analytics, payment splitting. Needed for growth.
• Simple rule: one-off sales by hand → QR; website, flow and scale → acquiring.