Korean payments, KakaoTalk and Naver, connected to your product

Korean customers mostly pay with domestic cards and easy-pay wallets such as Kakao Pay, Naver Pay and Toss Pay, usually through a Korean payment gateway (PG) such as Toss Payments, KG Inicis or NicePay. Which payment methods appear depends on the gateway and your contract with it.

The gateway contracts with the business that receives the money, and each gateway sets its own eligibility and document requirements. If you do not have a Korean entity, confirm eligibility with the gateway before any build starts. Stripe can accept South Korean local cards for businesses located in its supported countries, including the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK and several EU countries, with prices in KRW; South Korea itself is not on that list.

Taking Toss Payments as an example, its documentation describes this flow: development starts with test keys, and live keys become available after the payment-service contract. The customer pays in the payment window; on success Toss Payments redirects to your site with a payment key, order ID and amount. Your server checks that the amount matches the order, so a tampered amount cannot go through, then calls the payment confirmation API with your secret key. That confirmation must happen within 10 minutes of the payment request, after which the payment can no longer be confirmed. Webhooks report status changes in real time.

A KakaoTalk Channel is your business profile inside KakaoTalk, opened from Kakao's channel admin centre. Customers can add it and chat with you; this site's own consultation channel works that way.

AlimTalk is different: it sends informational messages, such as an order confirmation, payment receipt, booking notice or shipping update, to a customer's phone number through KakaoTalk, even if they have not added your channel. According to Kakao Business, only informational messages are allowed, and only through templates that pass Kakao's review; advertising content is not. Before sending, the channel must be converted to a business channel, its home set to public and customer-service contact details entered. AlimTalk is sent through Kakao's official dealers, whose service scope and per-message prices differ, and only to phone numbers collected lawfully.

Many Korean users would rather sign in with Kakao or Naver than create another password. Kakao Login starts with an app in Kakao Developers: Kakao Login is switched on, a redirect URI is registered for the REST API or JavaScript SDK, and the client secret is used when requesting tokens. Consent items define what the user is asked to share. Kakao's documentation notes that personal-information items such as email, phone number and name require converting the app to a Biz app and passing a business-information review. OpenID Connect can be enabled to issue an ID token alongside the access token, and apps that transfer personal information overseas register that transfer.

Naver Login works on the same OAuth pattern: an application is registered in Naver Developers with the service URL and callback URL, and the profile fields to request are chosen there.

Teams that already use Stripe ask whether they need a Korean gateway at all. The answer depends on where your business is based and which payment methods your Korean customers expect.

Some Korean services must confirm who a user is: age-restricted content, certain payments and sign-ups. In Korea this is usually done through mobile-carrier verification, often in the PASS app run by the three carriers, via a licensed identity-verification provider. The user confirms their name, date of birth and phone number, and your service receives a verification result it can store against the account.

We build the verification popup or redirect, the callback that receives the result, and the account logic around it. Users without a Korean mobile number cannot complete carrier verification, so services with overseas users need an alternative path, which we design with you. The provider contract is in your company's name.

Korean addresses come in road-name and lot-number forms with a five-digit postal code, and users expect to search for them rather than type them. Checkout and shipping forms usually use the government Juso address API, which needs an approval key, or Kakao's keyless postcode service (formerly Daum Postcode). We add the search to your forms, store the address in a consistent format and, where overseas staff need it, the English form of the address.

Businesses in Korea issue electronic tax invoices that are reported to the National Tax Service, either through Hometax or through a provider's API. We connect your billing or ERP to a provider so invoices are issued from the records you already keep. Which invoices you must issue, and when, is decided with your accountant.

Naver runs its own crawler and index, so a site that only looks after Google can be thin on Naver. Naver Search Advisor registers sites per host and verifies ownership with a meta tag or an uploaded HTML file. Naver asks that robots.txt allow its crawler and that you submit an XML sitemap and an RSS feed carrying the full text of recent posts; it also accepts IndexNow update notices.

Naver states that crawl requests are handled by priority and can take from a day to several weeks, and that a successful crawl does not guarantee exposure. This site carries Naver's ownership tag, allows Naver's crawler and publishes a sitemap and RSS feed in the same way.

Applications to payment gateways, Kakao and Naver are in Korean and often go back and forth. We prepare them with you, fill in the technical details and handle the communication in Korean, and our founder explains each step in English. Your company remains the contracting party; we do not sign on your behalf or give legal or tax advice.

Accounts that hold money, customer data or keys stay in your company's name. We build and connect; you own the contracts.

Each integration is a line item in the quote, sized by what it has to do: one payment gateway or several, which events send KakaoTalk messages, which login providers. The estimate tool lists them as options. Quotes are in KRW, VAT (10%) is not included, and payment fees, SMS and KakaoTalk messages are billed at cost.