How Payments Work or Don’t for Online Sales into Brazil!

This is the first of three Brazil Payments interviews we conducted with our friend Matt Cannon – SVP at GoInterpay and a little bit of a payments geek. No offense, Matt – you are a pretty cool and often the best-dressed payments geek in the room! Now that the pleasantries are out of the way…
Matt Cannon, SVP at GoInterpay & a “cool dude” as they say in California
We asked Matt to review some of the basic nuances we keep hearing about from sellers into Brazil. We captured his answers on our trusty iPhone.

Specifically, we wanted to know: “What’s the deal with this Boleto thing?”
A Boleto is essentially an off-line voucher allowing you to pay for your purchase with cash. You bring the voucher to a local kiosk at a convenient store or bank and say, “Hey I want to buy this toothbrush online and here is my receipt.” Then the convenient store guy says, “Mostre-me o dinheiro!” That’s “Show me the money” according to Google Translate.

The store/bank notes the transaction online, the vendor gets paid, and the buyer goes home and waits for their item.

Yes, it does seem to defeat the purpose of online buying, but there’s a method to the madness and it is fairly culturally engrained. If you don’t know about Boletos, watch this shorvideo to gain the basic understanding:

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