Most small businesses in the Philippines start by accepting digital payment the informal way: a personal GCash number, screenshotted to the customer, confirmed by a receipt sent back in chat. It works, and it is worth understanding exactly what it costs you before deciding whether to change anything.
Personal wallet, merchant account, and QR Ph
These are three different things and the differences matter.
A personal wallet transfer is a person-to-person send. It is free or nearly free, immediate, and completely untracked from your business's point of view. You have no record tying a payment to an order beyond a screenshot, no way to reconcile a day of sales without scrolling through a chat history, and no recourse if a customer claims they paid when they did not.
A merchant account is a business-registered wallet. It costs a fee per transaction, and in exchange you get a transaction record, a settlement report, and a payment provably tied to your business rather than to an individual phone number.
QR Ph is the national QR standard set by the BSP. Its significance is interoperability: one QR code that any participating bank or e-wallet app can scan. Before it, accepting both GCash and Maya meant displaying two separate codes and hoping the customer had the right app.
| Personal wallet | Merchant account | QR Ph | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fee | None or minimal | Per transaction | Per transaction |
| Record for reconciliation | Chat screenshots | Settlement report | Settlement report |
| Works across apps | No | Within that app | Yes |
| Tied to your business | No | Yes | Yes |
The real cost of the informal method
The per-transaction fee is visible, so it feels like the thing to optimise. The costs of not paying it are invisible and usually larger.
Reconciliation time. Matching a day of chat screenshots against a day of orders takes a person twenty to forty minutes. At six days a week that is roughly two working days a month spent on data entry.
Disputed payments. Without a payment record attached to an order, a disagreement about whether a customer paid comes down to two people's memory and an image that is trivial to fabricate.
Invisible revenue. Money arriving in a personal wallet does not appear in any business record. That makes it invisible to your own reporting, and it is an unhelpful position to be in when a lender, a landlord, or the BIR asks what the business actually turns over.
None of this means the informal method is wrong at the very beginning. It means it stops being appropriate sooner than most owners notice.
What online payment does to your cash flow
This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth being concrete.
Cash is instant. The customer hands you money and the transaction is closed.
Online payment is not instant, anywhere, for anyone. Between the customer paying and you being able to spend the money there is always a settlement period. That gap exists because a payment can be disputed, reversed, or refunded, and the platform holding it needs the money to still be there when that happens.
On Suki the shape of that is stated plainly. Proceeds from online-paid orders are credited to your wallet when the order completes, less commission, and become withdrawable after a 24 hours hold. That hold is the dispute window: if a customer reports a problem within it, a refund nets off cleanly rather than being clawed back from money you have already withdrawn.
Cash orders never touch the wallet at all, because you already hold the cash.
The fees, stated plainly
Anyone who will not tell you their fee schedule before you sign up is telling you something about the fee schedule.
On Suki:
- Orders paid online carry a payment fee of 3%, minimum ₱10.
- Commission on the item subtotal of online-paid orders is currently 0%.
- Walk-in and cash-on-delivery orders carry no commission at all.
- Withdrawals: minimum ₱200, fee ₱15, daily limit ₱5,000, processing 1–3 business days, to a verified GCash number or bank account.
- Topping up a wallet costs 2.5%, minimum ₱10.
- At least 30 days of written notice before any rate changes.
Work out what those mean for your basket size before you decide. On a 150-peso order a minimum fee is proportionally heavy; on a 1,500-peso order it is noise.
Practical advice
Keep accepting cash. A meaningful share of customers will pay cash for a long time yet, and refusing it costs more than the fees it saves.
Do not make the customer choose between four payment logos. Offer cash and one online path. Choice at checkout reduces completion.
Reconcile weekly, not monthly. A discrepancy found within a week can be traced. One found after a month usually cannot.
Check the payout destination is in the business name. Payouts to a relative account are a category of problem that is tedious to unwind later.
On Suki, a payout account number is encrypted and only decrypted at the moment staff process a withdrawal.
When to make the change
Move off the informal method when reconciliation starts costing you real time, when you have had a disputed payment, or when you want the revenue to be visible in a record you can show someone. Those thresholds usually arrive in that order, and the first one arrives sooner than expected.