PAY.JP Review

PAY.JP is an online card payment API for businesses in Japan. It is run by PAY, Inc. (PAY株式会社) in Tokyo, a wholly owned subsidiary of the listed e-commerce company BASE, Inc. Merchants integrate it with an API, client libraries and mobile SDKs, and accept Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express, Diners Club and Discover in Japanese yen, plus Apple Pay and, through API v2, PayPay. Pricing is published in full. As of November 2026 the free Standard plan charges 3.3% on every card brand. The Business plan charges 2.78% for ¥20,000 a month, and the Enterprise plan charges 2.59% on Visa and Mastercard and 2.7% on other brands for ¥50,000 a month. There is no setup fee, no refund fee, and refunds cancel the processing fee. Each payout costs ¥250. Funds are paid slowly by international standards: with the default monthly cycle, a month's sales arrive at the end of the following month, and a twice-monthly cycle is available. PAY.JP signs the card companies' merchant agreements on your behalf as your agent, so you never deal with an acquirer directly. It serves only Japanese companies and residents, and it does not accept adult, gambling, crypto or tobacco merchants. Public review data is thin.

Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using PAY.JP’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.

What PAY.JP is

PAY.JP is an online payment service that lets a Japanese business add card payments to its own website or app through an API. It is run by PAY, Inc. (PAY株式会社), headquartered in Sumitomo Fudosan Roppongi Grand Tower in Minato-ku, Tokyo. Its company page lists capital of ¥100 million and describes it as a 100% subsidiary of BASE, Inc., the company behind the BASE online-shop builder. Three of PAY's directors are BASE executives, including BASE's CFO.

PAY.JP's lineage starts with Pureca, a developer payments start-up founded in July 2012. BASE announced on 5 February 2015 that it had made Pureca a subsidiary and would launch a payments business under the PAY.JP name. PAY.JP went live on 7 September 2015, which is the founding year we give. BASE then set up PAY, Inc. as a separate company on 4 January 2018. BASE's announcement of the spin-off says PAY, Inc. took over the PAY.JP and PAY ID businesses (PAY ID, a buyer wallet, launched in 2016) and was a 100% BASE subsidiary from the start.

For scale, BASE's results presentation for the April–June 2026 quarter (published 5 August 2026) puts PAY.JP's GMV, measured by payment value on the payment date, at ¥59,170 million (about ¥59.2 billion), up 7.6% on a year earlier, with a take rate of 2.7% and revenue of ¥1,624 million from external customers only. BASE also says it is moving card payments for businesses it has acquired onto PAY.JP to lower its own processing costs, and in 2022 it said PAY.JP also processes the card payments for its BASE shop platform.

Why we list PAY.JP as a payment facilitator

The merchant signs one agreement, with PAY, Inc. Under Article 8 of the merchant terms, the merchant gives PAY comprehensive authority to sign the card companies' merchant agreements on its behalf, request authorisations and handle everything else with those card companies. Under Article 7, each sale's receivable is assigned to PAY, which collects the money, deducts its fee and pays out on its own schedule. PAY publishes the price, runs the first review and can hold funds. The partner card-company terms annexed to PAY.JP's terms include Life Card, JCB, American Express and Diners Club. In the site's taxonomy that is the facilitator role. The caveat is that in Japan's agency model, the card merchant contract is technically formed between the merchant and the card company. On that reading `iso` would be arguable, but an ISO does not collect and pay out the funds. PAY.JP is not a merchant of record, because the merchant stays the seller and bears refunds and chargebacks.

What it costs

• Standard plan (default): 3.3% on Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express, Diners Club and Discover, no monthly fee. PAY.JP recommends it below ¥4 million a month in sales.
• Business plan: 2.78% on all six brands, ¥20,000 a month, recommended from ¥4 million to ¥20 million a month.
• Enterprise plan: 2.59% on Visa and Mastercard, 2.7% on the other four brands, ¥50,000 a month, recommended from ¥20 million a month.
• Apple Pay: the same rates as cards on each plan.
• PayPay (API v2 only): 3.5% for physical goods and services, 9.0% for digital content, plus consumption tax, on every plan.
• Payout transfer fee: ¥250 including tax, deducted from each payout, including a payout that fails because of a wrong account name.
• No setup fee, no per-transaction fee and no refund fee. The processing fee is cancelled in full on a full refund and pro rata on a partial refund.

The pricing page, checked on 3 November 2026, says 'プランの月額は税込、カード決済の手数料は非課税です' (plan monthly fees include tax; card processing fees are tax-exempt). PAY.JP's sources disagree on how monthly plan fees are paid. The pricing page and a help article updated in February 2026 say the fee is billed on the 1st and offset against that month's sales, with an invoice sent if sales cannot cover it, but the legal-notice page (特定商取引法に基づく表記) still says monthly fees are paid by credit card. Confirm with PAY before upgrading. The help centre adds that PAY may charge separately for some operations without listing them, so ask before relying on an unusual service. This pricing dates from a renewal on 1 June 2024, which replaced the earlier Basic and Pro plans.

As a worked example, take ¥1 million a month in card sales. Standard costs ¥33,000 in fees. Business costs ¥27,800 plus ¥20,000, or ¥47,800. Enterprise costs ¥25,900 plus ¥50,000 on all-Visa/Mastercard volume, or ¥75,900. At ¥5 million a month the order flips: Standard costs ¥165,000, Business ¥159,000 and Enterprise ¥179,500. The Business plan starts to pay off at about ¥3.85 million a month. Enterprise only beats Business above about ¥15.8 million a month, even on Visa and Mastercard alone, because its rate on other brands is just 0.08 points lower.

PAY.JP also runs plans you cannot simply choose. PAY.JP Seed (for start-ups referred by designated venture capital firms) and PAY.JP Partner (for merchants referred by partner agencies) charge 2.78% with no monthly fee for one year, then revert to Standard. PAY.JP Travel (registered travel agencies, for corporate and arranged travel) and PAY.JP NPO (certified non-profits taking pure donations) charge 1.5% on Visa and Mastercard and 3.3% on other brands, with no monthly fee.

How it works

You create a free account and build against a test environment straight away. When you apply for live use, PAY checks the application, and then its partner card company reviews Visa and Mastercard, which PAY says takes about 3 to 4 business days. JCB, American Express, Diners Club, Discover and Apple Pay are reviewed only after Visa and Mastercard are approved, and take about a month. If an application is rejected, a re-review may not be possible at all, or may require about a year of clean trading elsewhere, and PAY may not give reasons.

Integration is API-first. PAY.JP provides server-side libraries for the main languages, iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native SDKs, a hosted checkout, recurring billing for monthly and annual plans, webhooks and team accounts with role permissions. PAY.JP says it is a PCI DSS v4.0 Level 1 service provider and that card numbers are tokenised before they reach your server. API v2 adds Checkout Sessions and PayPay. Japan required online merchants to adopt EMV 3-D Secure by the end of March 2025, and PAY.JP includes it at no option cost. PAY.JP does not offer convenience-store payments, bank transfers or currencies other than yen, and it accepts only Japanese companies and residents.

Payouts, holds and chargebacks

Payouts are slow by default. On the monthly cycle, all of a month's sales are paid at the end of the following month, so a sale on the 1st can take two months to arrive. The twice-monthly cycle shortens this: sales to the 15th are paid at month-end, and sales from the 16th are paid on the 15th of the next month. Each payout costs ¥250, and anything under ¥10,000 rolls over. Article 7(12) of the terms says that if a balance has rolled over for a year, PAY pays it by transfer, but may treat a balance under ¥1,000 as waived. For faster cash, merchants offered PAY.JP YELL BANK can sell future sales to BASE for a fee of 1–20%, with funds from the next business day.

The terms give PAY wide powers over your money. It can refuse payment until reviews are complete, and if it or a card company judges a merchant unsuitable, or finds its application information false, it can refuse payment, forfeit funds as a penalty (違約金としての没収), suspend or terminate the account without giving reasons (Art. 3). It can also hold payouts at its discretion while a chargeback or cancellation is expected (Art. 7(5)), and reverse the assignment of any receivable that is cancelled or charged back, recovering the amount from future payouts (Art. 7(9)). When a chargeback is raised, you can accept it or submit evidence once, by the deadline. A lost chargeback is deducted from that period's sales, and a negative balance is invoiced by post about five business days after the close date. PAY's help centre says chargeback protection applies only to payments authenticated with 3-D Secure at the time of the charge, and only against fraud. It also offers to introduce partner chargeback-guarantee services.

Contract terms

The merchant terms, last revised on 5 November 2025, have no fixed term and no termination fee. Either side can end the contract on 30 days' notice (Art. 22(3)). PAY can suspend or terminate immediately for a long list of reasons, from breach or a card company's request to its own judgment that a merchant is unsuitable, and it can treat six months without use and without a reply as grounds for termination (Art. 22(1)). It can change the terms without your prior consent by publishing the change and its effective date (Art. 29). Its liability to you is capped at the fees it actually received from you in the past month (Art. 24(4)). Japanese law applies, and disputes go to the Tokyo Summary Court or Tokyo District Court (Art. 35). PAY.JP's legal-notice page says it does not accept refunds or cancellations of its own fees and that it does not take phone enquiries.

Reputation and complaints

There is little independent review data. As of 3 November 2026, PAY.JP has an average of 4.1 from six reviews on the Japanese software review site ITreview, the most recent posted in October 2024. Reviewers mention low fees, an easy integration and a simple dashboard. Trustpilot has no page for pay.jp. PAY.JP advertises a 94.7% support satisfaction rate, but that comes from its own survey of merchants who joined between January 2024 and March 2025. Support is by email and contact form, and the legal-notice page says phone enquiries are not taken. Our searches in Japanese and English found no lawsuit, court judgment or regulatory enforcement action naming PAY, Inc. or PAY.JP. PAY.JP does not serve high-risk merchants: its prohibited list excludes adult content, gambling, crypto-assets, tobacco including nicotine-free e-cigarettes, in-game currency trading and most medicines.

Who should use PAY.JP

PAY.JP suits a Japanese company or sole trader with a developer on hand, selling through its own website, app or subscription service, that wants published prices and no setup cost. It suits merchants with steady volume best, because they can move to the Business plan once card sales reach about ¥4 million a month and cut their rate to 2.78% across all brands. Look elsewhere if you are outside Japan, need to charge in another currency, need convenience-store or bank-transfer payments, or cannot wait until the end of the following month for your money. If you do sign up, choose the twice-monthly payout cycle unless the extra ¥250 per payout matters more than the cash flow, and implement 3-D Secure on every charge so fraud chargebacks are covered.