It is tempting to assume card payment is simply better, but in practice what you can prepare decides the choice. Three paths are common in the Korean market, and they are not substitutes for one another.
Bank transfer — the easiest place to start
You publish account details and confirm the deposit. There is no contract to sign and effectively no fee, which makes it the sensible option while order volume is small. It remains a familiar way to pay for Korean customers.
The trade-off is that confirmation is manual. One problem recurs constantly in practice: the name on the transfer differs from the name on the order, because it came from a company account or a family member. The fix is simple — ask explicitly for the depositor name on the form and in the confirmation email, and quote the order reference alongside it.
When volume outgrows manual checking, an automatic deposit-matching service can be attached without changing the flow. Starting manual and automating later is the natural sequence.
A domestic gateway — to accept cards
Accepting cards and local wallet payments means contracting with a payment gateway. That requires a registered business, a review of what you sell, a fee on each transaction, and a settlement delay of several days. Mail-order business registration is typically required too.
There is a clear point where this becomes worth it. Payment confirms immediately, so the order can move to the next stage without you; the customer chooses how to pay; and cancellations and refunds are handled inside the system. Once orders arrive steadily, that automation is worth more than the fee costs.
Overseas payment — the currency problem
Serving customers abroad needs a separate route, and the most common mistake is converting the Korean price into it.
To be precise about the facts: PayPal does not support KRW as a transaction currency. You cannot simply pass a won price through it, and converting introduces three problems at once — a dependency on an exchange-rate feed, a displayed price that changes daily, and receipts that no longer match your accounting.
The recommended shape: one fixed price in won, one fixed price in your overseas currency, charged according to the payment method. The two are not conversions of each other; each is a price you chose. Whatever the exchange rate does, the screen, the charge and the record always agree.
One rule regardless of method
The displayed price and the charged amount must be identical. For domestic sales, state clearly whether tax is included, and make sure the checkout and the terms carry the same figure. “Listed excluding, charged including” is where disputes begin — and it costs you trust on the first screen, which is far more expensive.
How checkout screens are actually built is covered in the Themes & plugins archive, and you can see a working flow from application to payment confirmation on our application page and the optimization program page.
Next part
With a payment method chosen, the screen in front of it remains. The next part is the anatomy of a pricing page — and the heart of it is writing what is not included at the same size.