How to sell to Mexico: payment methods, costs and how the money gets back
A practical guide for selling into Mexico — how local customers pay, what it costs, and how the money comes back in local currency, PIX or crypto.
Pagnovo Team · 2026-08-14
Mexico is Latin America's second-largest consumer market and one of the most obvious destinations for a company expanding abroad — especially for services, SaaS and digital products, which never touch customs. This guide covers the three questions that decide whether the operation works.
1. How Mexican customers pay
Here is the mistake that costs the most: building a Mexican checkout around international cards and assuming it is solved.
SPEI already moves more money than cards in Mexico. It is the Bank of Mexico's interbank transfer system, settles in seconds, runs 24 hours a day 365 days a year, and is addressed by CLABE, an 18-digit number.
If you only accept international cards, three things happen at once:
- the Mexican issuing bank raises its fraud bar because the purchase is international;
- the buyer pays a foreign transaction fee plus their bank's spread;
- you already spent on traffic before finding out the sale did not go through.
A new trap, specific to 2026: the Bank of Mexico made the MTU (Monto Transaccional del Usuario) mandatory on 1 January. Anyone who never configured their own limit was left with an automatic cap of 1,500 UDIS per transaction — around MXN 12,800. The customer has the money and the transfer is declined anyway. If your ticket runs above that, it needs to be planned for.
→ Understand the MTU in detail and how to work around it
2. What it costs
The cost of selling to Mexico is not just the payment method's rate. Add up:
| Item | What it is |
|---|---|
| Processing rate | The percentage on the transaction |
| Flat fee | An amount per processed transaction |
| Conversion | Only applies if you convert the currency |
| Loss to declines | The invisible cost — paid traffic that never became a sale |
The last one hurts most and nobody puts it in the spreadsheet. A 10-point drop in approval costs more than any rate difference between providers.
3. How the money reaches you
This is the question that separates planning from improvising. Three routes:
- Keep Mexican pesos — makes sense if you have local costs: team, suppliers, media.
- Settle via PIX — the balance lands converted in your Brazilian company account, without a traditional international wire or a Mexican bank account.
- Settle in crypto — when that is the most efficient route for your operation.
Not deciding is deciding: an idle foreign-currency balance is a financial position, even when nobody chose to take it.
What about the legal side?
Brazil's FX framework changed. Law 14,286/2021, applying to operations from 2 January 2023, made it optional to keep foreign-currency proceeds from Brazilian exports abroad, and removed old restrictions on how those funds may be used.
In practice: bringing the money into Brazil became a choice, not an automatic obligation. Tax and documentation rules still apply and change depending on whether you export goods or services — align with your accountant before scaling.
Checklist to get started
- Accept SPEI, not just cards.
- Check whether your ticket brushes the MTU ceiling (~MXN 12,800).
- Price in pesos, with psychological values — not an ugly automatic conversion.
- Write the checkout in Mexican Spanish, including the limit-decline message.
- Define the settlement route before scaling media spend.
- Measure approval by method and amount band — that is where the leak shows.
The mistake that sums it up
Treating Mexico as "one more country where we accept cards". It has its own payment system — mature, dominant — and a new rule that quietly kills sales for anyone unaware of it.
Our Global Processing in Mexico accepts SPEI and bank transfer, settling in local currency, PIX or crypto. See also whether international PIX exists or talk to our team.