Offline payments

Note

Offline payments on POS is in Early Access and is only available to some merchants.

When you sell in person, you might encounter internet service outages. Offline payments let you continue to make sales if Shopify POS is temporarily disconnected from the internet. Shopify POS, POS GO, and POS Terminal captures payments after they reconnect to the internet.

Considerations for using offline payments

By turning on offline payments, you accept the increased risks related to payments that you accept when offline, including declined payments, chargebacks, or card fraud. When you accept payments offline, transactions aren't routed to the payment processor. You might not know that a transaction has failed until you reconnect to the internet. Payments can get declined for many reasons including cardholder insufficient funds, or a lost or stolen card being canceled.

If you need to process payments when you're offline, then you should reconnect to the internet as soon as possible to make sure that the payments you collect when offline complete. Reconnecting Shopify POS to the internet within 24 hours decreases the risk of declined payments.

If you accept a payment when offline, and the payment is declined when you reconnect to the internet, then you can use the email or phone number that you collected for the order, and contact the customer to collect the payment.

To accept payments offline, you need to use the POS Go, POS Terminal, Tap & Chip, Chipper 2X BT, Wisepad, or Chip & Swipe Reader.

Set up offline payments

You need to turn on offline payments in your Shopify admin. After Shopify POS has offline payments turned on, you can accept card-based purchases when Shopify POS loses internet connection.

Step 1: Activate offline payments

1. From your Shopify admin, click Point of Sale > Settings.
2. Click Offline payments.
3. Turn Accept offline payments on.
4. In the Transaction limits section, confirm the transaction and device limits that you want to have when you're accepting offline payments:
   • Transacion limit: the limit that you set per order that you can accept when offline. For example, if you set the limit to $100, then you can accept two or three cards on the same order, as long as the total that you're charging does not exceed $100. If the total of the order exceeds $100, then you can use an alternate payment such as cash to complete the order.
   • Device limit: The total of your offline card-based payments. When you're offline, you can only accept transactions up to the total that this is set to. For example, if you set your device limit to $5,000, then, your POS device can only complete transactions up until you have charged $5,000 in total.
5. Click Save.
6. In the confirmation window, confirm that you want to activate offline payments, and click Save.

Step 2: Give staff permissions to accept offline payments

Note

The permission for offline payments is set to off by default. You need to activate the offline payments permission for your POS staff roles before you can accept payments when your POS is offline.

Before staff can accept payments during the time that Shopify POS is offline, you need to make sure they have permissions to accept offline payments.

Staff must have the Accept offline credit and debit payments permission to accept offline payments.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Point of Sale > Staff.
2. Click Manage POS roles.
3. Click the POS role that you want to assign the offline payments permissions to.
4. In the Settings section, activate Accept offline credit and debit payments.
5. Click Save.

Offline payments limitations

Shopify POS can accept payments when you're temporarily disconnected to the internet. When you're disconnected from the internet, Shopify POS functions are limited:

• You can't aceept swipe cards or manual entry payments when you're offline.
• You can't search for a customer when you're offline.
• You can't accept tips when you're offline.
• Tap to Pay on iPhone isn't supported when you're offline.
• You can't accept gift cards, or sell gift cards when you're offline.
• Canadian businesses can't accept Interac card payments when offline.
• Australian businesses can't accept eftpos payments when offline.
• The POS Terminal requires a local network to stay paired. This means that if the local Wi-Fi network is interrupted then the POS Terminal won't process sales.

Accept payments when Shopify POS is offline

Offline payments let you continue to accept debit and credit card payments when not connected to the internet.

Accepting payments

Note

You need to collect either a phone number or an email from your customer when you make a sale when Shopify POS is offline. If you chose to send a receipt by text or email in the Shopify POS cart, then when Shopify POS is reconnected to the internet, the customer is sent a receipt automatically.

Steps:

1. Using Shopify POS, add products to the cart to complete the customer's purchase.
2. Tap Offline checkout.
3. Accept the card payment by letting your customer tap or insert their card.
4. Tap Done.
5. In the Order created screen, select either Email receipt or Text receipt to send a sales receipt to your customer after Shopify POS regains connection to the internet.

Reconnecting Shopify POS to the internet

When Shopify POS is offline, you can make sales, and accept payments. If Shopify POS isn't connected to the internet, then the offline payments save to Shopify POS, and sync to your Shopify admin after you reconnect to the internet. After Shopify POS reconnects to the internet, payments that you accepted when you were offline are processed automatically.

Note

If your POS device loses connection to the internet temporarily and you make sales when you're offline, then don't turn off the device, or sign out of Shopify POS. Logging out of Shopify POS, or turning off the device might cause loss of offline orders.

When Shopify POS is offline, orders display in the Orders tab with a Payment pending badge. After the payment is processed, the badge turns into a Paid badge. If the payment is declined, then the order also displays a Card declined badge.

Shopify POS

After Shopify POS reconnects to the internet, orders that you accepted when you were offline are completed. Shopify POS automatically processes the outstanding payments for the orders that you completed when disconnected from the internet.

If you become logged out of Shopify POS when you're offline, then you need to make sure to log back in, and reconnect your card reader to Shopify POS to collect payments that you accepted offline.

Shopify admin

When Shopify POS is offline, orders aren't synced with Shopify admin.

After Shopify POS reconnects to the internet, orders that you accepted when you were offline are synced with your Shopify admin and display in the Orders section.

Deactivate offline payments

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Point of Sale > Settings.
2. Click Offline payments.
3. Turn Accept offline payments off.
4. Click Save.