What does "Swiping" mean?
It just means to pay for an order on an international platform (any storefront, PayPal, AliPay, etc.). Obviously, if you're paying together with some other people as part of a Group Run, they WILL pay you before/after the transaction is actually made, but you have to understand that paying here would have some extra details to look out for. You need a card that can perform International transactions. It can be Credit or Debit, as both types in India will support it.
1. Forex
Your card may have stipulated additional fees for any transactions made in foreign currencies. This rate can be anywhere from 2-3.5% of the transaction value, plus GST. Read your card's fine-print for more instructions. If you are using such a card, remember to check your bank statement post-payment to know exactly how much the cost deducted was, and split the charges according to the monetary value of every person's order.
Alternatively, there are forex-free cards that will not charge you anything/will refund the entire forex charge to your account after a period. You can get one of those for relatively less hassle. Reach out to your bank, and if you are okay with working through a neobank product, you can use Fi, whose Infinite Plan allows you 100% forex-free transactions. This is not an ad, I just use it personally and it's worked well.
2. TCS
This is a lot more important. While you can bear the cost of the forex fees on your card as it's just a small percentage, TCS (Tax Collected at Source) is an advance tax collected by the Income Tax Department on any transactions that meet certain criteria. TLDR (as of FY2025) - You will be hit with a 20% tax if the total of your foreign remittances (payments) have exceeded 10,00,000 INR in the current Financial Year (April-March). Now that's a steep limit, surely, but a group run may have large transactions to the tune of 50,000 INR, or even more if MKIN's history is to go by. It would be prudent to never hit the 10L threshold, however, you will get to credit it as a tax refund when it is time to file your Income Tax Return, so you're not going to "lose" or "pay" any money, but you WILL be charged that extra 20% at the time of making the payment for the run. No comment on how much your CA will hate to see it on your ITR, though.
Read more about TCS here. Note that the article may be out of date, as it's a third-party source, but it's simplified enough to read through.
These two considerations are key to consider before volunteering to swipe for any orders. The rest is just payment collection and actually placing the order, which is a lot simpler of course. This is part of the wiki solely to make it clear and easy to anyone leading their first run.