If you're using Cloud POS 2.0 and the CitrusPay integration to accept credit and debit cards in-store, or to take payment on your ecommerce site, you can make use of the functionality to send a payment link to your customers.

This allows you to generate a link from the Point of Sale for the partial or full value of a transaction and share this link with your customer by SMS or email, making Customer Not Present transactions simple.

Your customer can then follow the link, make the payment, and this will be acknowledged in POS in the SMS messaging panel, and also in the CitrusPay Payment Link History page in backoffice. 

You can then tender the value of the order against the transaction, using a tender type of your selection.

Read on to find out more.

Generating a Payment Link

Once you set a customer against a transaction in the Point of Sale, you'll see the option to Share a Payment Link:

If the customer isn't due to pay the full value of the transaction at this point in time, we'd recommend saving the transaction as a special order, so you can recall the order in future and take the remaining payment.

It's also worth setting the transaction as a special order if the customer isn't likely to pay via the payment link right away.

Once you've added items to the transaction, clicking Share a Payment Link will open a window in which you can select the items for which you want to take payment via the payment link:

Untick the Include Line checkbox next to any items you don't want to include on this payment link.  This will reduce the value of the payment link total accordingly:

Payment Links cannot contain more than 20 lines, so if the transaction has more lines than this, you will need to generate more than one Payment Link.

When you're ready to do so, click the button marked Create Payment Link.

A new window will open from which you can also edit the SMS Message Prefix if you wish and either copy the payment link and send this to the customer via email, or click the Share with SMS button to send the link via text.

When the customer receives and clicks on the payment link, they'll see the details of the order, and fields into which they can add their payment details:

Once the customer has submitted their payment information and clicked Pay, they'll see confirmation on screen if the payment has been successful.

There are now two ways in which you can view that the payment has been made.

When the customer's account is selected in the Point of Sale and you have the SMS communications panel open (use keyboard shortcut CTRL+M to open this), you'll see confirmation here:

For a global view of all customers' payment links and their status, you can check the CitrusPay Payment Link History page in Cloud POS backoffice:

If needed, you can copy the payment link from this page and resend it to the customer.

When you've confirmed the payment has been made, you can now return to or recall the corresponding transaction and tender the value against the transaction.

Note that a tender type will not auto-populate, leaving you free to select the tender type you use.  You may like to create a new tender type to use for transactions of this nature. 

Please be aware that Payment Link refunds are not integrated with Cloud POS.  

If you need to issue a refund for a payment made using a Payment Link, you will need to arrange that separately with your customer, e.g. by making a direct bank transfer or a PayPal transfer. 

If you've created a new Tender Type in Cloud POS to tender these payments initially, we would suggest using the same Tender Type once you've processed the refund for the customer.  That will mean your overall Payment Link totals are correct within Cloud POS and Cloud Reports.