Best payment link solution for luxury retail: how to take high value transactions securely
Best payment link solution for luxury retail: how to take high value transactions securely
The leading payment link solution for luxury retail brings card and Pay by Bank together in one branded checkout. Smart Orchestration rules direct each high value transaction to the most suitable payment method. Card payments preserve the convenience and protections your customers expect. Pay by Bank removes scheme and interchange fees, reducing your cost on the highest value purchases.
Prommt delivers both and is trusted by clients such as West One Bathrooms, Williams Jet Tenders, Hedonism Wines and Johnsons Jewellers.
Why high value payments break in luxury retail?
A £12,000 watch does not behave like a £45 basket. The moment a sale moves off the shop floor, into a WhatsApp thread, a phone call or a personal shopping appointment, the payment becomes the weakest part of an otherwise polished experience.
Four things go wrong, and they go wrong repeatedly.
- Card limits get in the way. Issuer limits, daily caps and internal risk rules stop legitimate purchases at exactly the moment the client has decided to buy. Nothing kills a sale faster than a decline in front of a sales associate.
- Card fees eat the margin. On a five figure purchase, scheme and interchange costs can be a costly line item for your finance director..
- Chargeback exposure is structurally higher. Remote purchase fraud is now the most common type of fraud in the UK. UK Finance recorded 3.2 million cases in 2025, worth £423.5 million, in its Annual Fraud Report 2026. Every one of those started with card details reaching someone who should not have had them. On a single high value order, one dispute can cost more than the margin on several completed sales. UK Finance*
- Manual bank transfers create work. Sending account details over email is slow, it invites fraud, and someone has to reconcile it afterwards. Typos in sort codes are a regular occurrence.
Meanwhile the buying behaviour keeps shifting. Statista puts luxury watches and jewellery at roughly $157bn globally in 2026, with online sales climbing steadily as a share of the total. Remote selling is no longer the exception in luxury retail. It is a channel, and it needs a payment method built for it. Statista
What a payment link solution actually is?
A payment link solution lets a member of staff send a secure payment request to a customer by SMS, email, web chat or messaging app. The customer opens the link, chooses how to pay, and completes the transaction from their own device. Your staff never handle nor see sensitive card details at all.
The term Pay by Link is used across the industry. What separates one solution from another in luxury retail is what sits behind the link.
What to look for in a payment link solution for high value transactions?
Use this as a checklist when you compare providers.
Most providers handle the first two rows well. The rest is where advanced paylink solutions built for high value selling separate from those built for volume. Prommt covers all eight.
Three steps, easy to follow.
- Request. All you need is a mobile number or email address and the amount owed. Set a chase path across multiple messaging channels so follow ups happen without anyone remembering to send them.
- Collect. Your customer receives a smart link by SMS, email or web chat, with the option to pay by card or by bank transfer. The checkout carries your branding, and it works on the phone already in their hand.
- Track. Every request, alert and receipt sits in one interface. For a group with stores in Liverpool, Manchester and London, that means one report rather than three exports.
Your customers already have a preferred way to pay. The question is not which method to offer, but when each one makes sense.
Cards remain essential in luxury. Customers value their points, their protections and their credit lines, and asking them to give up a card they trust is not a customer experience strategy. A better approach is orchestration: cards when they earn their place, bank payments when they reduce your costs.
This is what orchestration means in practice: rules that decide how each payment is presented, so your team does not have to. Two settings do most of the work. Default Payment Method Displayed sets which option appears first in the customer journey. Set Card Limit defines a threshold above which only Pay by Bank is offered.
- Lower processing costs. Pay by Bank does not carry the scheme and interchange fees that scale with card transaction value.
- Instant settlement. All parties are notified immediately, so a watch can leave the safe sooner.
- No chargebacks. Chargebacks are not possible on open banking transactions, which removes an entire category of risk from your highest value orders.
- A familiar journey. The customer selects their bank, logs into their own banking app, and confirms.
Adoption backs this up. Open Banking Limited recorded 351 million open banking payments across the UK in 2025, up 57% on the previous year, and the ecosystem passed one billion cumulative payments in July 2026. Your customers already know how this works. Open Banking
In luxury, the payment is part of the product experience. Prommt presents your brand through the whole payment journey. Request emails come from your corporate domain. SMS arrives from a custom sender ID. The checkout carries your design language. Customers see a URL they recognise, which is exactly why completion rates stay high on payments that would otherwise be abandoned out of caution.
Features luxury retailers use most with Prommt – Elevate Every Payment
- Autocharge. Secure stored card payments, giving greater certainty over deposits and final balances.
- Recurring Payments. Personalised payment plans for bespoke commissions and staged purchases.
- Group Send. Send to several customers at once. Built for credit control, and it removes the need to chase outstanding balances one by one.
- Forward to Payer. The person placing the order can forward the request to whoever is actually paying. Useful for gifts, family purchases and corporate buyers.
- Controlled Access. Restrict refund issuing to management and finance staff, with two factor authentication on every account.
FAQs
What is the best payment link solution for luxury retail?
The strongest fit is a solution combining Pay by Link with both card and bank payment options, branded checkouts, 3D Secure 2 on card transactions, and value based routing rules. Prommt delivers all and is trusted by West One Bathrooms, Williams Jet Tenders, Hedonism Wines and Johnsons Jewellers.
How do luxury retailers take high value payments remotely?
Staff send a secure payment request by SMS, email or insert a link within an existing conversation, such as via a messaging app. The customer opens the link and pays by card or by bank transfer from their own device. Card details are never shared with or stored by staff, and every request is tracked centrally.
Are payment links safe for transactions worth thousands of pounds?
Yes, when the provider is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and applies 3D Secure 2 to card payments. Pay by Bank adds a further layer, because the customer authenticates inside their own banking app and open banking payments cannot be charged back.
How does Pay by Bank reduce costs on high value purchases?
Bank payments carry no scheme or interchange fees, so the cost does not scale with the transaction value the way card processing does. On a five figure watch or jewellery sale, moving the balance to Pay by Bank removes the largest single processing cost from the transaction.
Can I avoid chargebacks on luxury goods?
Pay by Bank significantly reduces dispute exposure, because chargebacks are a card scheme process and open banking payments settle outside it. For card payments, 3D Secure 2 shifts fraud liability to the card issuer rather than the merchant.
Can payment links be branded to my store?
Yes. Request emails are delivered from your corporate domain, SMS comes from a custom sender ID, and the checkout carries your brand. Customers see a URL they recognise, which is a large part of why completion rates hold up on high value requests.
Does this work across multiple stores and countries?
Prommt is an enterprise solution deployed centrally across multiple locations and users, with per user permissions and reporting consolidated into a single view. It operates in 13 countries today, covering Ireland, the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the US and Canada, and continues to add new markets