Payment Methods In Mexico: What Businesses Should Accept At Checkout

Mexico’s e-commerce market reached 54.39 billion USD in 2025, and it’s projected to reach 175.75 billion USD by 2034. A meaningful share of that market can’t be reached through a cards-only checkout, because nearly 51% of the adult population in Mexico lacks a bank account.

For this reason, Mexican consumers use a combination of payment methods for purchases, including cards, cash, bank transfers, and digital wallets. Meaning, merchants should cater to these preferences to succeed in the market.

Key takeaways

• Mexico’s payment landscape is a mix of digital and cash-based methods. Banked consumers typically use cards, digital wallets, and bank transfers, while cash and OXXO Pay provide the country’s large unbanked population a way to participate in e-commerce.
• Cards account for the largest share of online payments volume, but many of these transactions involve domestic Mexican cards processed through international acquiring, which can lead to lower authorisation rates in Mexico than in other markets.
• Cash and OXXO Pay help merchants reach customers without bank accounts or credit histories.
• Bank transfers through SPEI settle instantly and are inexpensive, making them a great alternative to cards for high-value or B2B payments.
• There’s no single best payment method for the Mexican market. Most businesses win by offering a combination of payment methods tailored to their specific customer segment and reviewing it regularly as consumer preferences evolve.

Payment methods in Mexico at a glance

Below are the payment methods a merchant selling into Mexico is likely to encounter.

Mexico’s payment landscape: cash usage and digital payment growth

Mexico’s payment landscape is a combination of two economies: a well-established cash economy that handles a large share of everyday spending, and a rapidly growing digital economy built around cards, wallets, and instant transfers. A merchant selling into Mexico has to plan for both economies, as neither is on track to fully replace the other in the near future.

Cash usage and the unbanked population

Cash remains one of the most widely used payment methods in Mexico, particularly for smaller, in-person purchases under 500 MXN. One reason for this is the country’s large unbanked population, with nearly half of Mexicans lacking access to financial services. 

Cash also plays a role in e-commerce through voucher-based payment methods that allow Mexicans to shop online and pay for their purchases in cash at physical stores. By supporting cash-based payment methods, merchants can reach customers who lack a bank account or card.

Digital payment growth and financial inclusion

Mexico’s digital payment market is also growing rapidly, driven by fintech adoption and the expansion of digital payment infrastructure. It is projected to grow at an annual rate of 15% between 2025 and 2035.

SPEI, Mexico’s instant bank transfer system, is a major part of this shift. It processed over 7 billion transactions in 2025. Digital wallets are also gaining traction, with wallets such as Mercado Pago, Google Pay, and Apple Pay projected to reach a 17% adoption rate by 2027.

Mexico has also introduced a new payment infrastructure to encourage consumers to move away from cash. CoDi, a QR code payment layer, was launched in 2019 and DiMo, a phone-number-based transfer service, in 2023. 

The result is a payment market where consumer preferences are changing. Merchants should support both established cash-based methods and growing digital options, while regularly reviewing their payment mix as customer preferences evolve.

Mexico in Latin America: market size and cross-border e-commerce

Mexico is Latin America’s second-largest e-commerce market by volume, behind only Brazil. E-commerce sales in the country reached approximately 789.7 billion MXN in 2024, representing an annual growth rate of 20%.

Businesses looking to expand into Mexico have a good chance of succeeding because customers here are willing to buy from foreign merchants. Nearly 8 out of 10 online shoppers report purchasing products from international websites. What makes the difference is whether or not a merchant can offer payment methods that work for their customers.

Credit and debit cards

Credit and debit cards are popular payment methods in Mexico, used for both online and in-person purchases, thanks to their security, speed, and broad acceptance.

Additionally, credit cards can be used to pay for larger purchases in instalments, a practice that is particularly popular among Mexican consumers. Bank cards can also be linked to digital wallets, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, allowing customers to complete purchases using their mobile devices.

Credit cards and meses sin intereses (MSI)

25 million credit cards were in circulation as of 2024, up 8.7% from the previous year. Visa and Mastercard account for the most card issuance, alongside the smaller domestic Carnet network.

International merchants offering credit cards to Mexican consumers should consider meses sin intereses (MSI), or interest-free instalments, which typically allow customers to spread a purchase over three to 18 months.

MSI is a baseline customer expectation in Mexico, particularly for higher-value purchases. Merchants that don’t offer instalment options risk losing conversions to businesses that do. However, offering MSI also means that the merchant absorbs the financing cost rather than passing it on to the customer or the bank. Therefore, merchants should account for this cost in their margins before enabling interest-free instalments.

Debit cards and e-commerce decline rates

Debit cards accounted for 38% of e-commerce sales volume in 2024, making them an important payment method merchants should consider. However, accepting Mexican debit cards presents a challenge for most international businesses if transactions are processed through overseas acquiring.

Many Mexican debit cards aren’t enabled by their issuing bank for e-commerce or cross-border transactions. When a transaction from one of these cards is routed through an international acquirer, the issuer may identify it as an out-of-territory transaction and decline it.

Local acquiring can help address this issue by processing and settling transactions in MXN and using BIN-level routing. This allows the transaction to be recognised as domestic by the issuing bank, improving the likelihood of authorisation.

Cash payments and OXXO Pay

The Mexican business-to-consumer e-commerce market is projected to reach 152 billion USD in revenue by 2030. Until voucher-based payment methods, like OXXO Pay, were introduced, a significant share of the Mexican population was unable to participate in digital commerce because they lacked a bank account or a card.

OXXO Pay allows customers to pay for online purchases in cash at physical OXXO stores. When the customer selects OXXO Pay as their preferred payment method at checkout, they receive a payment voucher containing a barcode and a reference number. They can take this voucher to their nearest OXXO store and pay in cash. The merchant receives the payment confirmation and can continue with order fulfilment.

Running through a network of more than 20,000 OXXO stores nationwide, OXXO Pay accounts for close to 20% of online payments in Mexico.

When supporting cash payments, merchants should plan for three operational differences. First, once a cash payment is made, it is final. Customers cannot initiate a card-style chargeback. Second, refunds don’t follow a standard reversal process through the same rail. Third, if a customer doesn’t complete payment, the voucher expires rather than being retried automatically.

Bank transfers and instant payments: SPEI, CoDi and DiMo

SPEI is Mexico’s real-time interbank electronic payment system operated by the Bank of Mexico. It allows customers to transfer money between bank accounts instantly, 24/7.

Customers can choose SPEI at checkout and complete the payment using their account number or CLABE (Clave Bancaria Estandarizada), an 18-digit standardised bank code.

CoDi is a QR code and NFC payment layer built on top of SPEI that allows customers to make transfers without manually entering account details. The payments are processed through SPEI, with funds transferred directly to the recipient’s account and the transaction confirmed immediately.

DiMo is a newer system that enables customers to send an SPEI payment using the recipient’s phone number instead of CLABE. Customers download the DiMo app, register their phone number, and link it to a bank account. When making a payment through DiMo, the recipient’s phone number is used to identify the corresponding bank account.

SPEI, CoDi, and DiMo can be used for P2P transfers (sending and receiving money between individuals), bill payments, online purchases, and B2B payments.

For merchants, SPEI is particularly useful for high-value orders and B2B invoicing because transfers settle instantly, cost little per transaction, and can’t be reversed once sent. However, the trade-off is a less seamless checkout experience. Customers may need to leave the merchant’s checkout to complete the transfer through their banking app, while merchants need to reconcile incoming payments with individual orders, often using a payment reference.

Digital wallets

Digital wallets in Mexico generally fall into two categories, with distinct integration pathways. Card-linked wallets store and tokenise a customer’s credit or debit card, while balance-based wallets hold funds separately from a card and can often be funded through other methods, including cash.

Apple Pay and Google Pay

Apple Pay and Google Pay are card-linked wallets that tokenise a customer’s credit or debit card. For merchants, supporting card-linked wallets improves the payment experience and, in turn, conversions by making checkout faster and safer, particularly on mobile. 

However, card-linked wallets are still subject to the issuing bank’s authorisation decisions and the same decline behaviour as the underlying card.

Mercado Pago, PayPal and balance-based wallets

Instead of relying directly on a card at checkout, balance-based wallets hold funds independently and can often be topped up through alternative methods, including cash. This gives merchants a way to reach customers who may not be able to complete a card-based payment.

Mercado Pago is a major wallet in Mexico, while PayPal remains a common option for cross-border purchases. Mexico-specific wallets are also gaining traction. For instance, Spin by OXXO had more than 13.1 million users and processed an average of 63.2 million transactions in 2024.

Unlike card-linked wallets, which can often be enabled as an extension of an existing card acceptance setup, each balance-based wallet typically requires its own integration, settlement process, and reconciliation workflow.

Alternative payment methods: BNPL, store cards and vouchers

While they represent a smaller share of the market, alternative payment methods (APMs) in Mexico help merchants reach specific customer segments that may not be served by cards or bank transfers.

Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services such as Kueski Pay and Aplazo allow customers to spread the cost of a purchase over instalments without requiring a traditional credit card. Mexico’s BNPL market is projected to grow by around 33.5% annually and reach approximately 18.51 billion USD in 2030.

Other APMs, including department-store credit cards and regional voucher networks, tend to be tied to specific retailers, customer segments, or product categories rather than being used broadly across e-commerce.

For most merchants, APMs are best considered an addition to the core payment stack as they can be particularly useful for price-sensitive customers and for higher-value purchases.

Contactless payments and in-person payments

The shift toward digital payments is also changing how Mexican consumers pay in physical stores. Contactless payments are growing rapidly, with Mercado Pago reporting that they accounted for 37% of its card transactions in Mexico in 2025.

NFC and QR-based contactless payments use many of the same underlying payment rails as their online counterparts. For merchants with both physical and online operations in Mexico, this means payment acceptance should be considered across both channels rather than treated as two completely separate decisions. As customers become accustomed to faster digital payment experiences online, they increasingly expect the same convenience when paying in person.

Which local payment methods should a merchant accept?

Merchants should start with the payment methods most relevant to their target customers rather than choosing those with the largest overall market share. The right mix depends on factors such as the customer segment, average order value, product type, and whether the business sells online, in person, or both.

For most merchants, that means cards with local acquiring as the baseline. Additional methods can be introduced over time as transaction volumes, customer preferences, and operational capacity justify the investment.

How to start accepting payments in Mexico: a merchant checklist

Step 1: Choose a payment service provider (PSP) with local acquiring in Mexico, rather than routing Mexican transactions through an acquirer based elsewhere.

Step 2: Price and settle in Mexican pesos. Several local methods, including OXXO Pay, only process in MXN.

Step 3: Enable cards first, and measure authorisation by BIN rather than relying on a single blended authorisation rate, which can easily mask a large decline in domestic debit.

Step 4: Add OXXO Pay and SPEI to expand reach and reduce cost, as these two methods can extend coverage beyond card-holding customers.

Step 5: Enable Apple Pay and Google Pay tokens alongside existing card acceptance to improve mobile checkout conversion.

Step 6: Define what the order state machine does while a payment is pending before launch, so deferred-confirmation methods like OXXO Pay and SPEI aren’t accidentally treated as instantly authorised.

Step 7: Agree reconciliation references with finance before going live, since cash and bank-transfer methods are matched back to orders by reference number rather than by an automatic card-network handshake.

How Unlimit helps merchants accept local payment methods in Mexico

Unlimit gives merchants access to local payment methods in Mexico, including cards with local acquiring, OXXO Pay, SPEI and regional wallets, alongside over 1,000 APMs through a single integration.

For businesses selling into Mexico, that means cards, cash, bank transfers, and other local payment methods can be managed through a single reconciliation stream rather than requiring a separate provider, contract, and integration for each additional method.

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