Payment link vs bank transfer: which to put on your invoices

Put both on your invoices. A bank transfer is the cheapest way to receive money, close to free on most business accounts, but it relies on the customer copying a BSB and account number and remembering to do it. A payment link is a button in the invoice email that opens a card payment page; it costs a few percent of the invoice but turns paying into a single action, which usually means money arrives sooner.

The question is not which is better in general but which matters more for a given invoice: the fee, or the days. A related pair of pages define the terms: what a payment link is and Stripe Checkout for invoices.

The fee arithmetic

Stripe’s standard Australian pricing, read on 13 October 2026, is 1.65% plus 30 cents for domestic cards and 3.5% plus 30 cents for international cards, with fees including GST. On a $2,200 invoice, that is $36.60 for a domestic card and $77.30 for an international one.

A platform that sends the link may add its own fee. OneCraft takes 2% of each card payment on Starter, 1% on Pro and 0.5% on Pro+, with Stripe’s fees on top, and a free account cannot connect Stripe at all. The table above adds those together. On Pro, a domestic card costs $58.60 on a $2,200 invoice, about 2.7%.

A bank transfer costs whatever your bank charges to receive, which on most business accounts is nothing. So the card link has a real cost, and the only reason to pay it is that it changes customer behaviour.

Speed

The cost of waiting is easy to forget because it does not show up as a line on a statement. If a card link means a $2,200 invoice is paid on the day it arrives instead of three weeks later, that is three weeks of cash you did not have to fund from your own account.

Bank transfers themselves are fast now. The Reserve Bank describes payments over the New Payments Platform as available to the recipient in near real time, around the clock. The delay is not the rail but the customer: opening their banking app, adding you as a payee, copying the reference and actually doing it. A card link removes those steps.

Newer bank based options sit between the two. PayTo lets a customer authorise payments from their bank account through their online banking. It is cheaper than cards on Stripe’s price list but still a fee, and it is not offered on the OneCraft pay page, which takes cards through Stripe Checkout only.

Fraud and changed bank details

Each method has its own risk.

The big risk with bank transfer is payment redirection: someone compromises an email account and sends a fake invoice or a “we have changed banks” message, and the customer pays a criminal. The defence is procedural. Print on every invoice that your bank details will never change by email, and ask customers to confirm any change by phone on a number they already have.

The risk with card links is a fake link. A customer who clicks a link in a spoofed email could be taken to a lookalike page. A pay page on your own system that only ever hands over to the processor’s own checkout reduces this. In OneCraft, the Pay now button checks the checkout address is a checkout.stripe.com page before redirecting and refuses anything else.

Card payments also carry the possibility of a chargeback, where the customer disputes the payment with their bank. For services that were clearly accepted and delivered, keep the accepted proposal and its acceptance record as evidence.

What customers prefer

business.gov.au’s guidance on payment methods notes that cards are now the most common electronic payment method, and that card providers charge service fees. In business to business work, many customers still pay invoices by bank transfer in a weekly or monthly run from their accounting software, and a card link is irrelevant to them. Individuals paying a tradie, a photographer or a tutor are the opposite: they pay from a phone, and a link they can tap from the email gets paid faster than details they have to type.

Offering both

The practical setup is the same for most small businesses:

1. Put your bank details on every invoice, with your business name as the account name.
2. Add a card payment link for customers who want it.
3. Use the card link by default for individuals and for deposits, where getting paid on the day of acceptance matters most.
4. Mark bank transfers paid as they arrive, and let card payments mark themselves.

In OneCraft, every issued invoice has a public pay page with the amount due, the items, the PDF and your bank details printed as you entered them. When Stripe is connected on a paid plan, the page also shows Pay now, which opens Stripe Checkout; a payment confirmed by Stripe marks the invoice paid without you touching it. Bank transfers are marked paid by hand. When a proposal with a deposit is accepted, the deposit invoice is created due that day, so a client can pay by card within a minute of saying yes. The invoice pay link page walks through it.

A worked comparison

Tidewater Digital invoices two clients $2,200 each in the same week. The first, a company with a monthly payment run, pays by bank transfer 26 days later at no cost. The second, a sole trader, taps the card link in the invoice email and pays the same evening; on the Pro plan Tidewater receives $2,141.40. The card cost $58.60 and brought the money in 25 days earlier.

Neither choice is wrong. The point is to let each customer use the method that gets them to pay soonest. The invoice example shows where bank details and payment terms sit on the page, and how to write an invoice covers the rest of what belongs there.