Virtual POS or payment institution?

The question that comes first: what are you selling?

The payments discussion usually starts in the wrong place. “Which virtual POS is cheaper” skips a prior question: is what you sell consumed inside the app, or delivered in the real world? That distinction decides the whole matter, because in the first case you have no choice to make.

For digital content and subscriptions consumed inside the app, the store's own payment system is mandatory. For physical goods and services delivered in the real world you can build your own stack — and pay no store commission on those sales. Teams that compare POS providers before settling this spend months planning the wrong integration.

What is the difference between a bank POS and a payment institution?

Both let you take card payments, but the relationship sits in a different place. With a bank's virtual POS your counterpart is the bank itself; if your account is already there the money path is short and the commission is part of your commercial relationship. With a payment institution a licensed intermediary steps in: it aggregates several banks' POS behind one integration, takes on instalment and campaign management, and takes its own share in return.

The choice usually falls out like this: with a deep single-bank relationship and low transaction variety, a bank POS stays simple. If you need multi-bank instalments, several payment methods, fast setup and one integration, a payment institution removes a serious amount of work.

What paperwork does a virtual POS application need?

The list varies by provider but the core is constant: tax certificate, signature circular, trade registry gazette, certificate of activity and the company's bank details. With those ready, the paperwork is a day's work. The real delay does not come from documents, it comes from your website.

The provider also reviews the page you sell on. It looks for a distance sales contract, a refund and cancellation policy, delivery terms, clearly visible prices, the company's legal name and contact details, and a valid certificate. These read like a compliance checklist, but their function is risk assessment: the provider is looking for a page that can show who sold what when a chargeback arrives.

How do you verify a licensed institution?

Providing payment services in Türkiye requires authorisation, and the authorisation is issued by the central bank under Law No. 6493. The institutions in operation and the scope of their permissions are published on the central bank's own page.

Before signing, check two things: whether the institution is on the list, and whether the scope of its permission covers what you need. The scope distinction is easy to miss — an institution may be authorised for some payment services and not others, and providing an unauthorised service on your behalf makes both of you liable.

How do you compare commission, settlement and instalments?

Looking at the commission rate alone is misleading. The total cost of the same transaction has four parts: the commission rate, the settlement delay before money reaches your account, the rate that climbs with the number of instalments, and the deduction applied on refunds and chargebacks. Put all four in the same table when comparing two quotes.

For cash flow, settlement delay is often more decisive than commission. A one-point difference in commission is easily wiped out by three extra days of settlement — particularly in a business financing its own stock.

Can you hold card data on your own servers?

The moment card data enters your systems your PCI DSS scope grows. The standard covers every environment where cardholder data is processed, transmitted or stored, and brings with it obligations from network segmentation and logging to access management and regular testing.

For most businesses the right architecture is never to receive card data at all: with a hosted payment page or iframe the card details go from the browser straight to the provider and only a token comes back to you. Recurring billing runs on that token too, so a subscription model does not require you to store cards.