Free Payment Gateway for Online Stores: MONA Pay

After 14,000+ projects, the sentence we hear most from online shop owners is that they are looking for a free payment gateway for their online store. The reason is the same for everyone. Percentage fees on each order add up at month end to a significant amount. Say the fee is 1%: a shop with revenue of 500 million VND a month loses 5 million VND just to receive its own money. For customers paying by bank transfer, that cost can be removed. The money goes straight into the shop's bank account. MONA Pay only reads the incoming-credit notice and tells the website to confirm the order. The free plan covers 500 transactions a month and never expires.

The pain of fees cut by today's intermediary gateways

Clients who come to MONA often complain that their sales revenue is held or charged too much once they commit to mainstream e-wallet payment systems. PayPal charges around 4.4% plus a fixed fee per transaction, and the shop's profit margin visibly shrinks after a month of steady business. According to a report from the Department of E-commerce and Digital Economy (Ministry of Industry and Trade), operating costs are an enormous burden for online retail, where every dong of capital has to turn over extremely fast to restock. You need a tool that reconciles automatically, not a third party that holds your money for several days before letting you withdraw, which is heartbreaking. It costs you 40 million a month for nothing.

Many businesses get short of capital simply because their payment partners' settlement waiting policies are too rigid and cumbersome. The trouble is that most services today charge a tax directly on the shop's revenue. When online business competes over every thousand dong, carrying an extra transaction fee is like swimming with a stone tied to you, and it puts huge pressure on cash flow. We understand that heartache well.

Truly free means the money does not pass through an intermediary

Many places advertise a “free gateway”, but you should ask closely how the money travels. Payment gateways and e-wallets receive the money on the shop's behalf before sending it on. Their fees are a percentage of the transaction value, with the exact rate set in each business's contract.

MONA Pay works differently. The customer scans a VietQR code and transfers straight into the bank account in the shop's name. MONA Pay never touches the money; it only receives the incoming-credit signal and sends it to the website. Since it holds no money, there is no percentage to charge. The free plan covers 500 incoming transactions a month. Above that there is a fixed plan at 99,000 VND for 2,000 transactions. The way a website closes orders automatically when a customer pays by transfer is described by us step by step so you can see it before deciding.

Why we built a transfer confirmation system

We were actually in your exact position once, wearing ourselves out looking for a free payment gateway for an online store and no one could meet the requirement of money arriving instantly. Since 2022, MONA has built the MONA Pay system itself to collect renewal and upgrade payments for the companies in its own ecosystem. 6,000+ customers have paid smoothly through this internal system, and only in 2026 did we feel confident enough to open the official version at monapay.vn. The customer's money goes straight into MONA's ACB account, the order code embedded in the transfer content is scanned by the system, and the order status switches to paid automatically within 2 seconds. Extremely fast.

We decided not to charge any percentage of the transaction amount on any plan, whether the customer buys a big order or a small one. The free plan supports up to 500 orders a month, and if you go over that, the next fixed plan starts at just 99,000 VND a month for as many as 2,000 transactions. Running a business is costly enough, so an automatic incoming-credit tool with no percentage fee lets you keep all your revenue and focus on your core business. There are no hidden fees at all.

How this solution handles real orders

MONA customers often worry that staff will have to hold the owner's phone to check receipts every time someone buys, which can expose sensitive access or risk leaking internal information. With this automatic confirmation service, the buyer just raises the camera and scans a dynamic VietQR code that is already filled in with the amount down to the dong and the exact order code as the content. When the customer goes to the site and picks the payment option, this code appears immediately.

When the money arrives, the system immediately pushes a notification through Telegram or plays a sound from the payment speaker at the counter, so both staff and the warehouse know to pack the order. The accountant no longer has to sit clicking through statements at 9 in the evening. The order opens right away. This is a practical way to help you reduce the cart abandonment rate caused by a payment process that gets stuck waiting for staff to confirm by hand.

The shopping process becomes so smooth that buyers have no pause in which to change their mind or hesitate, and the shop's cash flow turns over many times faster as a result. The free bank QR code generator on monapay.vn supports VietQR for 36 banks, runs right in the browser with no tedious app to install, and even has a ready-to-print version to put at the checkout counter. As soon as the customer scans, the order matches immediately.

Incidents we have run into and how we fixed them

Drawing a nice-looking QR code is the easy part. The real difficulty of building an automatic incoming-credit system lies in handling the times when the data the bank sends back does not match the original technical documentation. Some banks send transaction notices with the header oddly misplaced, and our standard system returns a 422 error and skips that transaction right away. No joking around.

Banks will not change their huge systems to suit us, so our developers had to rewrite the data-reading layer to match the standard and replay the dropped transactions to save customers' orders. Another time, in September 2026, a server configuration incident left out a secret key, so the webhook fired and got a 401 error, and the customer's order was not credited even though the money had been deducted in an instant. We had to go into the webhook history on the my.monapay.vn dashboard, add the key and click bulk Resend, rescuing every order stuck that night. The system's webhooks are properly signed with HMAC-SHA256, and any request more than 5 minutes off its creation time is flatly rejected to guard against replay. The lesson we often give clients is to always turn on webhook failure alerts and watch the success rate, and never assume that once the code runs it will keep running forever without breaking.

Proof from MONA Host's own project

To help you see how powerful this automatic flow is, look at how we run the MONA Host system, which provides server infrastructure and domain names for websites. With just one ACB bank account, the system still tells clearly which money belongs to which product, based on the prefix code the customer puts in the transfer content, so there is no need to open a separate bank account for each product. This automatic flow runs very smoothly. The customer transfers with the right code, the system reads the prefix, finds the right renewal order, reopens the service immediately and sends a report message into the company's internal group. Nobody has to step in by hand. We let several products share 1 account number without mixing up any money, and everything is clear and transparent down to the smallest figure. Each code match like this takes 2 seconds, and no one has to look things up by hand.

Another example is a MONA webinar, where attendees transferred money with the program code plus their phone number at the end of the content. The transaction code printed on the bank app receipt is completely different from the bank code reported to the server, so orders cannot be matched carelessly by that code. We had to match by the phone number in the content combined with the amount and the time down to the second, so we could report in the right order who came first and who came later to the organizers' group. If you want to review this history, go to my.monapay.vn and open the Transactions section to see it right away.

When you should not automate yet

Although many people are eagerly searching for a free payment gateway for an online store to automate everything, our sincere advice is that if your shop has fewer than 20 orders a day, you do not need to write API integration code and spend money on it. Just create a ready payment link on the pay.monapay.vn page and pair it with a Telegram bot that reports incoming credits to your phone, and that is smooth enough for your operations staff. It takes only 10 minutes. Using the wrong tool in the wrong place is exhausting. Also, MONA Pay does not suit international customers paying by Visa or Mastercard, because we do only one thing well: confirming domestic bank transfers. Do not assemble your payment flow from drag-and-drop no-code tools that chain apps together for a real business, because the flow easily breaks when one side changes its API with nobody watching, leading to money coming in while the order does not open. Anything involving money is always sensitive, so it must run on a system that stores history, can resend messages and raises an alert the moment something goes wrong.

When your scale gets much bigger, consider implementing multichannel selling properly before connecting the API so the system can close orders automatically across the board. Having the money sit in your own bank is a major reassurance, so do not choose a solution that routes money through an intermediary wallet before it reaches you, unless you badly need card payments.

FAQ

Does MONA's solution hold the store's money? 1. This solution does not hold money. MONA Pay only reads the transaction notifications that the bank pushes over, and the money goes straight from the buyer's account into your bank account, while the system holds not a single dong for reconciliation.

How do I integrate it into an online store that is already running? 2. We have a ready-made WooCommerce payment gateway plugin. You just download and install it, create an API key on the admin page and add it to the site configuration, and it is done in 5 minutes with no coding knowledge.

What happens if a customer transfers the wrong amount? 3. The system constantly matches the actual amount and the transfer content code. If the customer transfers less or more than the dynamic QR code generated, the order is held and the shop owner is notified to handle it manually, so no faulty order slips through.

Where can I read more about pricing? 4. You can see the details on the price list page of the MONA Pay system, and we commit to charging no percentage on any transaction, whether the order is large or small.

To set up a smooth order-closing process instead of endlessly hunting for a troublesome free payment gateway for an online store , you can sign up for an account at my.monapay.vn to try the sandbox, or call hotline 1900 636 648 and we will connect you.