Offline Payments

Offline payment methods are payment options that don't require customers to submit a credit card or any other real-time transactions. You may want to use those options if you want money to change hands after placing orders rather than at checkout. For example, such a workflow would fit your business processes if your customers are supposed to pay via offline bank transfer (wire transfer) - in such a case, at checkout a customer gets all the necessary information, such as your bank account details and total order cost, and then makes the actual payment.

Offline Payment Workflow

When an offline payment is used, no actual payment is supposed to take place at checkout. Instead of it, a customer is informed of how to transfer money to a seller and whom and how to contact after the payment. They go through all checkout steps and place an order by pressing the 'Place order' button - after that a customer sees the order confirmation page, the order is saved in your store and email notifications are sent. Instantly, it becomes visible in your control panel along with all necessary details about customer and ordered items. Such orders get "Queued" status, which indicates that the order was placed successfully, but you haven't received any funds yet. Again, in case of using an offline payment method, a customer isn't charged at the checkout, nothing asks them to submit a credit card payment or any other real-time payment transaction in your store. The payment itself is expected to be done outside IONOS after the order is placed. As soon as the customer pays for it and you receive the money, you can change the order status to 'Accepted' and ship the ordered items to a customer.

Supported Offline Payment Options

By means of the built-in offline payment options, you can set up any offline payment in your store. There are three offline methods types, which all work the same way described above except for the details they ask customer to fill in. You can base your store's offline payment methods on them. They are listed below.

Offline Basic

When this payment processor is used, a customer is not asked for any payment details at checkout apart from the standard address form. You can use Offline basic for any custom offline payment option you want. For example, it can be used for setting up the following payment methods in your store:

  • Wire transfer
  • Cash on delivery
  • Phone ordering
  • Fax ordering
  • Money ordering
  • etc.

Offline Check

With Offline check payment options, a customer is asked for a check Owner's full name, Checking account number and Bank routing number. You can use for any kind of check payments you like:

  • Personal check
  • Business Check
  • etc.

Purchase Order

This type of offline payments allows your customers to buy your items using a purchase order. A customer is asked for a PO number, Company name, Buyer's full name and Job position at checkout.

Set Up an Offline Payment Option

  1. Open your control panel and navigate to System settings → Payment → Payment methods.
  2. Choose one of the existing offline payment options in the list (they all have Offline Basic, Offline Check or Purchase Order in the payment processor column).
  3. If there isn't an offline payment option you'd like to use, just select one of the existing Offline basic option - you will be able to customize it.
  4. Name the option as you want (e.g. Cash on delivery) - for that, click on the payment method name and put the wording you like.
  5. (Optionally) set instruction for the customer that they see at checkout upon selecting this payment method. In order to do that, click the 'Instruction for Customer' link and enter instruction text.
  6. Enable the payment method by clicking the Enable link in the right column.
  7. Save the change.