Online Payment Methods Compared: The 2026 Guide

Six families cover almost every way you can pay for something online. They differ far less in speed than in three things that decide whether a method suits you at all: what the merchant learns about you, who carries the charge, and whether the money can travel back the way it came.

The six families of online payment method

The table below is the short version of this whole page. Read it by column rather than by row. Each column is a question worth asking before you commit to a method, and most of the disappointment in this field comes from asking only about the fee.

Method family	Fee principle	Typical amounts	What the merchant receives	Refunds	Can it receive a payout?	Where it works
Cash voucher (CashtoCode eVoucher)	Free for you at purchase and at redemption. A small number of crypto-focused resellers add 1 to 5 per cent	Commonly 25, 50, 100, 150 and 250 in your local currency; some resellers stock 10, 20, 500 and 1,000	A 20-digit PIN and the amount. Nothing else	A redeemed code is final. An unused code usually goes back through the reseller within 14 to 30 days	No. Deposit only	Partner merchants: casinos, sportsbooks, crypto exchanges, VPN and hosting, gaming marketplaces, dating platforms
Prepaid card	Activation, top-up and monthly charges are common across the category	Set by the card issuer	Card number and expiry date	Handled between the issuer and the merchant	Sometimes, as a refund back onto the card	General online retail, plus most merchants that accept cards
E-wallet	Charging models differ sharply between providers. Currency conversion and payout to a bank are the usual charge points	Set by the wallet, often tied to your verification level	A wallet identifier, usually alongside your name or email address	Provider-mediated, often with a formal dispute process	Yes	Wherever the wallet has been integrated
Credit or debit card	Your bank sets conversion and cash-advance charges. The merchant carries the acceptance cost	Your credit line or your account balance	Card number, expiry date, security code, plus a 3-D Secure step	Chargeback rules give you the most room to argue	Yes	The widest acceptance of any family
Bank transfer	Domestic transfers are usually free to the payer. Cross-border transfers carry a bank-set charge	Your balance and your bank’s own transfer ceiling	Your name and your account details	Reversal is difficult once the transfer has cleared	Yes	Most merchants that sell into your country
Buy now, pay later	Nothing if you pay on schedule. Late fees and interest are set by the provider	Set by the provider after a check	Name, address and date of birth. A credit check is standard	Provider-mediated and tied to the instalment plan	No	Retail checkouts where the provider is integrated

The fee column describes how each family charges, not what any single provider currently costs. Price lists change, sometimes quietly, so check the provider’s own fee page before you decide. Only the CashtoCode row carries figures, because those are the ones that are ours to state.

You will notice the table has no market-share column. That is deliberate. There is no figure we can stand behind for the voucher and prepaid share of e-commerce, because the ECB counts prepaid cards inside its card category and folds vouchers into a residual Other bucket. An honest gap beats a confident estimate.

What the merchant actually learns about you

Every checkout collects something. The question is what.

A card payment hands over the card number, the expiry date and the security code, then routes you through a bank verification step. A bank transfer hands over your name and your account details. Buy now, pay later goes furthest of all: name, address, date of birth, and a credit check that leaves a record somewhere outside the transaction itself.

A prepaid voucher stops at the code. When you redeem a CashtoCode eVoucher, the merchant sees the 20-digit PIN and the amount, and no bank or card data has travelled through the payment at any point. That is also the honest limit of the claim. Buying the voucher is a separate transaction with a separate counterparty, and if you paid the reseller by card, that card statement records the purchase. What it never records is the merchant where you eventually spent the code. We set out what the code carries and what it deliberately does not in whether the CashtoCode eVoucher is safe.

Privacy is not a niche concern in this market. The European Central Bank found that 58 per cent of euro-area consumers were worried about their privacy when making digital payments or handling other banking business. One caveat on that number: the same report gives 60 per cent in its body text, so we quote the lower of the two.

Who pays the fee, and at which moment

Three moments can carry a charge. Buying the instrument, using it, and letting it sit unused.

Cards and wallets tend to charge on use, most often through currency conversion, while the merchant carries an acceptance cost you never see on your side of the screen. Prepaid cards as a category carry activation, top-up and monthly charges. Buy now, pay later stays free until the day you miss an instalment, at which point the provider’s late-fee schedule takes over.

We charge you at none of those three moments. The reseller normally sells an eVoucher at face value, the merchant credits the full face value with nothing skimmed off the top, and a code sitting unopened in your inbox does not lose value over time. There are no maintenance fees and no monthly charges. The single documented exception is a small group of crypto-focused resellers that add a handling fee of 1 to 5 per cent to cover blockchain conversion.

One more thing to plan for. If you redeem a voucher in a currency the merchant does not use as its base, the merchant applies its own exchange rate, so buying in the merchant’s currency avoids that spread entirely. The full breakdown sits on CashtoCode eVoucher fees.

Deposits go one way, payouts come back another

This is the row people skip, and it causes more annoyance later than any other line in the table.

The CashtoCode eVoucher moves money in one direction. It is a deposit method, and there is no mechanism to send a balance back onto a used PIN. When you want money out of a merchant account, you choose a separate payout option that the merchant offers, typically a bank transfer or an e-wallet. Prepaid vouchers as a category work this way, so it is not a quirk of ours.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: decide your payout route before you make your first deposit. A merchant that accepts your deposit method happily may still require a bank account, or an identity check, before it releases money to you. That check comes from the merchant’s own legal obligations rather than from the payment method you used on the way in. For deposit and payout options set side by side at gambling operators specifically, we keep a running overview of casino payment methods.

How much cash and how many wallets are still in play

The picture that gets repeated in headlines is that cash is finished. The measured picture is slower, and more interesting.

Cash still accounted for 52 per cent of point-of-sale transactions in the euro area in 2024. Measured by value rather than by count it drops to 39 per cent, behind cards at 45 per cent, which tells you cash is doing the small everyday jobs rather than the large ones. Worldpay, measuring something different again, puts cash at 15 per cent of in-store spend value worldwide in 2024, down from 44 per cent a decade earlier. Those two numbers do not contradict each other. One counts transactions in the euro area, the other counts value across the world, and putting them in the same sentence without saying so would be sloppy.

Wallets are where the value has gone. They carried 53 per cent of global e-commerce spend in 2024 and 32 per cent of in-store spend, which sounds like a story about wallets replacing cards until you notice that most wallets are funded by a card sitting behind them. A wallet is a surface, not a source of money.

Meanwhile the online share of everyday life keeps climbing. Online payments made up 21 per cent of all everyday euro-area transactions in 2024 and 36 per cent of the value, against 7 and 18 per cent in 2019. Inside that online slice, cards took 48 per cent of payments in 2024, down from 54 per cent in 2019, with e-payment solutions on 29 per cent. Those two lines moving in opposite directions describe the gap this whole category exists to fill: people still hold and prefer cash, and more of what they buy sits behind a checkout that cannot take a banknote.

Which method fits which situation

If the merchant is a general online retailer, a card or a wallet is the practical answer and a voucher is not. The eVoucher is built for digital services. It does not work at Amazon, eBay, supermarket online shops, airline booking sites or high-street retailers, because those merchants have not integrated the payment gateway.

If you hold no account at a bank at all, the ladder of options is shorter than most guides admit. We have written out what genuinely remains in how to pay online without a bank account.

If you have an account but no credit card, the options widen considerably. That situation is far more common than the marketing around cards suggests, and it gets its own page: paying online without a credit card.

If the appeal is specifically that a payment leaves no trail across your everyday banking, start with the mechanics of the voucher route in paying online with cash.

And if you simply want to spend a fixed amount and then stop, any prepaid instrument does that better than a card does, because the ceiling is the balance rather than your self-control.

Compare CashtoCode against a specific method

Most people arrive here already holding one alternative in mind. These pages take that alternative seriously and set the two methods side by side on fees, limits, data sharing and payouts.

For the other cash-voucher brands, start with CashtoCode vs Neosurf, or with our long-standing comparison of CashtoCode vs paysafecard. If you have been weighing up several voucher products at once, paysafecard alternatives lines them up in a single table.

For the wallet side of the market, we compare CashtoCode vs MiFinity and CashtoCode vs Jeton. Both of those solve a different problem: they hold a balance and they can receive payouts, which the eVoucher cannot.

And for the case where the phone already in your hand is the payment method, CashtoCode vs Apple Pay sets out what changes when a card sits behind the wallet.

Where the CashtoCode eVoucher fits

The CashtoCode eVoucher is a prepaid online payment method built around a 20-digit PIN. You buy a voucher with a fixed value from an authorised online reseller, the code arrives by email, and you enter it at the checkout of a partner site. The value is fixed at purchase and the code is single-use. Once redeemed, the balance drops to zero and the code cannot be used again.

In select regional markets you use CashtoCode Classic instead, a barcode-based payment you settle in cash at a retail counter. The two products do not overlap. Markets have moved between them in both directions, so the merchant’s own live payment page is the reliable place to check which one applies where you are.

Reseller checkouts across the network typically accept Visa or Mastercard, PayPal, bank transfer or SEPA, several e-wallets, and major cryptocurrencies. The PIN usually arrives within seconds. Paying by bank transfer is the one route that can add minutes or hours, because the reseller waits for that payment to clear first.

Where the code goes after that is a defined list rather than the open web: online casinos, sports betting sites, cryptocurrency exchanges, VPN and hosting and cloud services, gaming marketplaces, and dating platforms. Before you buy, open the merchant’s payment page and look for the name among the available methods. Affiliate listings go stale, and the merchant’s own page is the only source that is current by definition.