Do you take cards? The payment methods your restaurant isn't publishing
Publishing your restaurant's payment methods —cash, card, transfer, invoice— on the page, before the customer orders, keeps the card minimum or the included tip from feeling like a surprise on the bill.
Friday, 9:40 p.m. The delivery driver from Rubén’s pizzeria, in Villahermosa, knocks on the door with two family-size pizzas. The bill comes to $340.
“Do you take card?”
“No, cash only.”
The customer has a $500 bill and no one in the house has change. The driver heads back to the restaurant for change, fifteen minutes there and back, with the pizzas going cold on the bike. The customer did pay, sure, but next time he orders somewhere else, and he’s never going to tell Rubén why.
That customer wasn’t lost over the food or the price. He was lost because the pizzeria’s payment methods — the ways it accepts payment: cash, card, transfer, invoice — weren’t written anywhere he could read before ordering. One thirty-character line — we accept card at the door, or cash only, please have change ready — and the night ends differently.
Why should I publish my restaurant’s payment methods?
Because the bill is the one moment in your restaurant where a surprise almost always lands badly, and publishing your payment methods — saying what you accept before the customer orders — keeps them from finding out about a legitimate rule exactly when there’s nothing they can do about it.
Everything else at your restaurant can surprise someone pleasantly. The place can look nicer than they expected. The dish can arrive bigger than they thought. The music can click with someone who wasn’t expecting to like it.
The bill can’t. At the bill, any detail the customer didn’t know beforehand feels the same: like you hid it from them. It doesn’t matter that you never meant to. The $200 minimum to pay by card, the 10% service charge that was already built in, the “we don’t take card” at the moment of paying — all of it reads like fine print that showed up at the end.
And none of those is actually a problem. Charging a card minimum is legitimate, not having a card terminal is legitimate, including service on large tables is legitimate. What bothers people isn’t the rule: it’s finding out about the rule when there’s nothing left to do about it. Publishing it fixes that without you changing anything about how you charge — it just says it beforehand.
What payment methods should I list on my restaurant’s page?
Five pieces of information are enough, and with four most restaurants are already covered:
- What you accept, in order. “Cash, debit and credit card, and bank transfer.” If you don’t have a terminal, say so in plain words: “Cash only.”
- Whether you accept card on deliveries. This is a different question from dine-in and almost nobody answers it. If the driver carries a terminal, say so; if not, write “delivery is cash only, please let us know what bill you’ll pay with.”
- The minimum, if you have one. One line: “Card accepted from $150.”
- Whether you issue invoices, and what you need to issue one.
- Whether service is already included, starting from how many people and how much it is.
That’s it. You don’t need a “Payment Methods” section with Visa and Mastercard logos. You need the answers to exist somewhere other than inside the head of whoever’s at the register.
Should I set a minimum for card payments?
Yes, you can, and it’s legitimate — but publish it or drop it entirely; having it apply inconsistently is worse than not having one at all.
This advice has a real cost, and it’s worth saying plainly: if you publish “card accepted from $150,” you will lose some $120 orders. What’s not obvious is that you’re already losing them today — you just lose them later, at the register, with the customer already seated and already annoyed, which is the expensive version of losing them.
But there’s a worse trap: applying the minimum inconsistently — charging it some days and not others, depending on who’s working the register and what mood the customer seems to be in. That turns a rule into a lottery, and the customer who did get charged feels singled out. If you’re going to have a minimum, put it on the page and stick to it. And if you feel embarrassed publishing it, that’s a good sign you don’t actually want it anymore: the terminal fee on a $120 order is about three or four pesos, and losing the customer costs more than that.
Should I say on my page whether my restaurant issues invoices?
Yes — it’s the detail almost no restaurant publishes, and it’s what decides the big office orders.
When the office next door orders food for twelve people, whoever’s placing the order isn’t picking the best dish: they’re picking whoever will give them an invoice, because that’s what gets them reimbursed. If your page says nothing, you get ruled out without anyone even asking.
Two lines are enough:
“Yes, we issue invoices. Send us your tax registration via WhatsApp the same day of purchase and we’ll send it within 24 hours.”
And if you don’t issue invoices, say that too. A “we don’t issue invoices” saves you the three-message conversation that was going to end in no anyway. Whoever needs an invoice leaves before taking up your time, and whoever doesn’t need one never even noticed.
How do I let people know I split the bill or that service is included?
By publishing it on the page, not explaining it at the table: how many cards you can run per bill, and whether service is already included on large tables.
How many cards you run per table. If it’s three at most, say so. The table of eight friends who want to split it eight ways isn’t asking to annoy you — they just didn’t know. If they read it beforehand, one person pays and the rest transfer them the money, and that conversation happens among themselves, not with you.
Whether service is already included. “Tables of 8 or more include 10% service.” Publishing it does exactly the opposite of what you might fear: whoever reads it before arriving doesn’t argue about it, and the server stops being the person delivering bad news at the end of a good night.
A tip that gets decided on its own, at the bill, is one of the few things a customer actually talks about afterward — and not in a good way. The same tip, flagged on the page ahead of time, nobody mentions at all.
What payment information should I NOT publish on my page?
Two things: your full CLABE bank account number, and event deposits or holds — neither belongs in the payment methods section.
Your CLABE out in the open. A bank account published online gets copied, reused, and ends up in screenshots asking your own customers for money in your name. Just say “we accept transfer” and send the actual details over WhatsApp when someone asks.
Event deposits and holds. That’s not a payment method — it’s a whole separate topic, with its own questions (how much to put down, by when, what happens if they cancel) — and it deserves its own section.
And to be clear: this is not about accepting payments online. You’re not setting up a payment gateway or connecting anything; you keep charging exactly the way you do today, at your tables and at your door. The only thing that changes is that now it’s written down.
Just describe it, and it’s done
You don’t have to build anything. Describe it, and the page comes out ready:
“Page for Rubén’s Pizzeria in Villahermosa. Menu with prices, photos of the pizzas, hours Tuesday to Sunday from 1 to 11 pm, and a payment methods section that says: cash, debit and credit card from $150, bank transfer, and yes we issue invoices with same-day tax registration. On delivery orders, the driver does carry a card terminal. Big WhatsApp button for orders.”
It comes out published, with its own link, and that link is what you send whenever someone asks.
Ask whoever runs the register
Tonight when you close up, ask whoever worked the register just one question: what did people ask you today when it came time to pay?
That person has spent months answering the same list of questions, and nobody’s ever asked them for it. It’s not that you don’t know your own business — it’s that this part of the night just isn’t the part you’re there for. They’ll give you two or three things in thirty seconds, and at least one of them you won’t have seen coming.
Those are the lines missing from your page. You don’t have to guess them, or count them, or wait two weeks: they’re already in the head of someone who works with you.
Describe it at proyecta.dev and publish it.