Taking Card Payments at a Farmers Market or Pop-Up Stall

Markets and pop-ups are a different problem to your usual stall. You don't have a fixed QR code printed and laminated for every product, the basket's different every time, and signing up for a card machine rental just for the odd Saturday rarely makes sense. Here's how to take card payments anyway, with nothing more than your phone.

Why a card machine isn't always the right call

Card readers from the likes of Zettle or SumUp work fine if you're trading every week, but for occasional markets, summer shows or Christmas fairs, you're often paying for a machine that sits in a drawer the rest of the month. Renting or buying hardware for a handful of market dates a year doesn't add up for a lot of small sellers.

The alternative: build a payment link on the spot

Instead of a card machine, you build the customer's basket on your own phone as you'd ring up a sale — picking your products and quantities, or for anything priced by weight, weighing it and typing in the real figure so the price is always exact.

• No card reader or hardware to buy or carry
• Works for any basket, however it's made up that day
• Exact pricing for anything sold by weight, calculated from your usual rate
• The customer pays on their own phone — you're not handling their card at all

Once the basket's confirmed, you get a link and a QR code for that exact total. Show them the QR code to scan, or send the link by text, email or WhatsApp — whichever's quickest in the moment. They pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and the money goes straight to your bank account.

Tips for market day

• Charge your phone — obvious, but it's the one thing the whole system depends on.
• Check your signal beforehand — most markets and showgrounds have decent mobile coverage, but it's worth knowing before you're relying on it mid-queue.
• Keep a float of cash too — some customers will still want to pay that way, and it's no extra effort to accept both.
• If you sell the same few things every week, your regular product QR codes still work fine for those — payment links are for whatever's different basket to basket.
• Cancel unpaid links — if someone changes their mind, cancel the link from your dashboard so it can't be paid by mistake later.

Same tool, different setting

This is exactly the same payment links feature that some sellers use back at their usual stall to collect the balance on a deposit order — see our click & collect feature if you also take pre-orders for things like Christmas turkeys. One feature, two very different uses.