Why am I getting 'The merchant cannot accept these kinds of payments at the moment' as an error?

Why am I getting 'The merchant cannot accept these kinds of payments at the moment' as an error?

This error would occur if tokenization has not been enabled on your PayFast Dashboard. 


To enable these types of recurring payments, do the following:


  1. Navigate to Settings > Developer Settings.


  1. Ensure that a Security Passphrase is set on your account. If this field is blank, please enter a passphrase and click Save.



  1. Navigate to Settings > Recurring Billing and toggle  Enable Tokenization to Enabled so that the setting is active.


For more information on tokenization, refer to our
 Tokenisation feature page.  

    • Related Articles

    • Why am I getting a 'Merchant is unable to receive payments from the same account' error?

      This error is occurring because you are checking out using the same email address that is associated with your PayFast account. This is due to the fact that the payment engine will not allow you to make payments to yourself. To resolve this error, ...
    • Where is my Merchant ID and Key?

      New PayFast Dashboard To find your Merchant ID and Key after your account has been verified, do the following: Log in to your PayFast account. Navigate to Account > Personal Information. Your Merchant ID and Key can be found on the top right-hand ...
    • Can I receive recurring payments?

      Yes, PayFast does support recurring billing.  PayFast recurring billing allows merchants to create two methods of recurring payments; one is a subscription model, the other is an tokenization model. The subscription model supports membership or ...
    • How do I reconcile payments?

      The way to look at this is to consider the PayFast account as a second business bank account and payouts are just a transfer of funds from one account (the PayFast one) to another account (your bank one). This means that all you need to recon is to ...
    • Can I receive credit card payments?

      Yes, as an Individual, Business or Cause account holder you can receive payments funded by credit card (both local and international). You will need to verify your account to receive payments funded by credit card. See the credit cards page for more ...