How to accept online payments in Mauritius

The short answer

Most online stores in Mauritius end up offering two or three payment methods side by side rather than one:

1. A card payment gateway, through your bank or a payment processor, for local and overseas cards.
2. At least one local wallet, usually MCB Juice, sometimes with my.t money, blink or a MauCAS QR code.
3. Bank transfer for larger baskets and business customers, and sometimes cash on delivery.
4. PayPal, when a real share of your buyers are abroad and prefer it.

The right mix depends on who buys from you. The rest of this guide explains each option, the providers we could confirm from their own published information, and what to check with them.

The payment options at a glance

Card payment gateways

A payment gateway lets customers pay by card on your site and sends the money to your business account. In Mauritius you can get one from your bank or from a payment processor that works with banks.

Through your bank: the MCB payment gateway

MCB offers an online payment gateway to businesses, including SMEs. According to MCB, it accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Apple Pay and Juice (as “Request to Pay”), runs payments through 3-D Secure, is PCI compliant and is developed and hosted by Mastercard. MCB lists settlement in MUR, USD, GBP, EUR, JPY and ZAR, and three integration models: merchant-hosted, merchant-hosted with 3-D Secure, and a bank-hosted payment page. For SMEs, MCB asks for business registration documents, the certificate of incorporation and financial statements. The fee is a merchant commission per transaction, published in MCB’s business tariff guide.

If your business account is with another bank, ask your relationship manager whether the bank offers online card acceptance itself or through a partner processor, and compare that with the options below.

Through a payment processor: Peach Payments and MIPS

Peach Payments works with merchants in Mauritius. Its developer documentation lists, for Mauritius, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diners cards (in MUR and, depending on the acquirer, EUR and USD), Apple Pay, MCB Juice, blink by Emtel, MauCAS QR and PayPal. It publishes a WooCommerce plugin that supports Mauritius.

MIPS is a Mauritian payment provider. It publishes a WooCommerce plugin that takes international cards and local payment methods, a Shopify app for card payments through any bank in Mauritius with 3-D Secure, and documentation for PrestaShop and Magento. You need a MIPS merchant account to use them.

Hosted payment page or on your site? With a hosted page, the customer types their card details on the bank’s or processor’s page and card data never touches your server. That keeps your own security obligations much lighter.

MCB Juice on your website

Juice is MCB’s mobile banking and payment app. There are three ways to accept it on a website:

• Through the MCB gateway, which lists Juice “Request to Pay” next to cards.
• Through Peach Payments, which added Juice to its checkout under a partnership with MCB announced in April 2024.
• Manually, with a Juice merchant account: the customer pays your Juice merchant QR code, you receive an SMS confirmation, and your team marks the order as paid. This works for a small volume, but someone has to check every payment.

With an integrated route, the order is confirmed automatically when the payment goes through, so stock, confirmation emails and invoices follow without anyone retyping anything. Peach Payments lists Juice payments in MUR, and lists refunds through its gateway as not supported for Juice, so agree how you will refund those orders, for example by bank transfer.

my.t money, blink and MauCAS QR

my.t money, from Mauritius Telecom, lists an online QR checkout for e-commerce, an online payment API and an in-app checkout API on its business page, with coverage through MauCAS and instant settlement. Its merchant application asks for your business registration details and card, the certificate of incorporation for a company, and the VAT certificate if you are VAT registered.

blink by Emtel lets customers pay directly from their bank account through the blink app, and Peach Payments offers it at checkout in Mauritius. Peach Payments also offers a MauCAS QR code at checkout: a code generated for each order, with the amount filled in, that shoppers scan with a Mauritian payment wallet.

These methods settle in MUR. As with Juice, check how refunds are handled, since a gateway may not refund wallet payments the way it refunds cards.

PayPal and Stripe for a Mauritian business

PayPal has a Mauritius site with its own fee schedule, which covers currency conversion and withdrawals to a local bank account. Read those terms before you enable it, since conversion and withdrawal fees change what you actually receive. PayPal can also be added through Peach Payments, which lists it for Mauritius in USD, GBP and EUR.

Stripe does not list Mauritius among the countries where businesses can open an account. Stripe requires a legal entity registered in the country of the account, with a local bank account and address there. A company registered only in Mauritius therefore cannot open its own Stripe account. If your group also has a company in a country Stripe supports, such as France or the UK, that company can. Otherwise, use a local gateway that settles in EUR or USD to take overseas cards.

Bank transfer and cash on delivery

Bank transfer costs little to run and suits business customers and large orders. WooCommerce includes it as a built-in method: your bank details appear at checkout and in the order email, the customer uses the order number as reference, and the order stays on hold until you confirm the money has arrived. Custom stores can work the same way. The cost is time: someone has to check the account and release each order.

Cash on delivery is also built into WooCommerce and can be limited to some shipping methods, for example your own delivery and not courier parcels. It reassures first-time buyers, but brings refused deliveries, cash handling and daily reconciliation with drivers. You can also limit it to certain areas or order values.

What to check before you sign with a provider

• Settlement currency. Which currencies you can settle in (MUR, EUR, USD or others), into which account, and what conversion applies when a customer pays in another currency.
• Onboarding documents. Expect your business registration, certificate of incorporation, financial statements, VAT certificate and details of authorised signatories. Have your terms, delivery and refund policy pages live on the site, since a provider may review it before approving you.
• 3-D Secure and PCI. Whether the checkout uses 3-D Secure, and whether card details are entered on a hosted page or on your own site, which changes your security obligations.
• Refunds. Full and partial refunds from the dashboard, how long they take, and which methods cannot be refunded through the gateway.
• Plugins and integration. A maintained plugin for WooCommerce or Shopify, or API documentation, a test environment and server notifications for a custom store.
• Payment confirmation. An order should only be marked paid when the gateway confirms it to your server, not when the customer lands on the thank-you page.
• Settlement timing and reports. When the money reaches your account, and whether reports match your orders for accounting.
• Fee structure. Ask for the full written tariff. Fee types to look for: set-up fee, monthly fee, a percentage per transaction, a fixed amount per transaction, volume-based packages, currency conversion, payout or withdrawal fees, and fees on refunds and chargebacks.

Which combination fits your business?

How Artover can help

We are a web agency in Cybercity Ebene. We build online stores in Mauritius, on WooCommerce (see WordPress and WooCommerce development) or as a custom platform, and integrate the payment methods your customers use. The merchant account is opened in your company’s name with your bank or processor; we handle the technical side: the payment flow, success and failure handling, order statuses, VAT invoices and go-live tests.

For an example, read how we rebuilt a beauty retailer’s online store with MCB card payments, MCB Juice and bank transfer. If you are planning a store or adding payments to an existing one, send us your brief through the quote form for a fixed written quote after a free discovery call.