Your internet will go down at some point. A storm, a cut line, a router that needs a reboot, or a market stand where the signal was never good to begin with.
Whether you can still take card payments during that window depends almost entirely on one decision you made earlier: which card reader you bought.
This guide explains what works offline, what doesn't, and the trade-off you're accepting when you turn it on.
The short version
| Card reader (Stripe Reader M2) | Phone or tablet tap-to-pay | |
|---|---|---|
| Take cards while online | Yes | Yes |
| Take cards while offline | Yes | No |
| Contactless tap offline | Yes | — |
| Chip / insert offline | Yes | — |
| Swipe offline | No | — |
If taking cards during an outage matters to your business, you need a physical reader. There is no software setting that adds this to phone tap-to-pay.
Why phone tap-to-pay can't go offline
"Tap to Pay on Android" uses the NFC chip already inside your phone or tablet. No extra hardware, which is genuinely convenient — and it's a perfectly good choice for many sellers.
But it has no offline capability at all. That isn't a TallyTill limitation we could remove; the underlying payment platform doesn't support storing payments on the device for that method. When the connection drops, phone tap-to-pay simply stops taking cards.
A physical reader supports store and forward: it captures the payment locally and sends it once you reconnect.
What you can still accept offline
A common misunderstanding is that "offline means chip only" — that customers have to insert their card and you lose the fast contactless tap.
That's not the case. With a physical reader offline you can still accept:
- Contactless taps — physical contactless cards
- Phone wallets — Apple Pay, Google Pay and similar
- Chip / insert
The one method that stops working is swiping the magnetic stripe. That's a deliberate security rule: magnetic stripe data is easy to forge, and it can't be verified while there's no connection to check it against.
So the customer experience during an outage looks almost identical to a normal sale.
The trade-off you're accepting
This is the part worth reading twice, because it involves your money.
When a card payment happens offline, it hasn't been approved yet. Your reader captures the card details and holds them. The actual authorisation happens later, when your connection returns.
Nearly all of these go through. But some won't — insufficient funds, a cancelled card, a card reported lost. And by then the customer has taken the goods and left.
You carry that risk, not the customer and not us. There's no way to design it away: the entire point is completing a sale without the network needed to check the card.
That's why TallyTill asks you to acknowledge this before the feature can be switched on. It isn't paperwork for its own sake — it's a genuine decision about your business.
How to keep the risk small
Offline mode is worth using for most sellers, because the alternative is turning away every card customer until the internet returns. A few things keep the exposure sensible:
Set a per-sale limit. A declined $8 coffee is a bad afternoon. A declined $600 order is a real loss. TallyTill lets you cap the value of any single offline sale.
Set a total limit. This caps how much money can be sitting unconfirmed on the device at once. Once it's reached, the till stops accepting offline cards until it reconnects and clears the backlog.
Think about who your customers are. A regular local market crowd is a very different risk profile from high-value sales to strangers passing through.
Reconnect promptly. The longer payments sit unsent, the longer you're exposed. Payments forward automatically as soon as the connection returns — nothing to remember.
Setting it up
- Use a physical reader and pair it with your till.
- Turn on offline card payments in the Portal, under your payment settings. You'll be asked to acknowledge the risk above first.
- Set your limits — per sale, and total held on the device.
- Take one ordinary card sale while online. This isn't optional. Your till needs to have connected successfully at least once before it can process anything offline, so don't unbox a reader on the morning of an outage and expect it to work.
After that it's automatic. When the connection drops, the till keeps taking cards. When it returns, the queue forwards on its own.
What happens to the rest of the till offline
Card payments get the attention, but the rest keeps working too:
- Cash works as normal — it never needed the internet.
- Sales are recorded on the device and sync when you reconnect.
- Your catalog and prices are stored on the device, so items still scan and ring up.
- QR code payments require the customer's own phone to have a signal, which they often will even when your Wi-Fi is out.
Choosing
If you're deciding between a physical reader and phone tap-to-pay, don't weigh it on price alone. The real question is what happens on the day your connection drops during a busy period.
With a reader: you keep selling.
Without one: you're limited to cash and whatever your customers can pay from their own phones.
For a fixed shop with reliable business internet, phone tap-to-pay may be entirely adequate. For a market stand, a pop-up, a rural location, or anywhere signal is patchy — the reader pays for itself the first time it saves an afternoon of sales.