Payment link
A shareable link that lets a customer pay on a hosted page, no website required.
A payment link is a URL you create for a set or custom amount and send by email, text, or social; the customer pays on the processor's hosted page. It's the fastest way to get paid without building a checkout, popular with freelancers and service businesses.
How it works
A link stays payable until you cap it. Mark one-off invoices single-use, or you will end up refunding the client whose accounts team paid the forwarded email a second time. The other trap is liability. Nobody was present to look at the card, so a disputed link payment is yours to lose, and 3D Secure is worth switching on for customers you have never dealt with. Put an invoice number in the link's reference field and the payout report reconciles without guesswork. Refunds, disputes and reporting otherwise behave like any other online sale.
You create one in the dashboard or through the API: an amount, fixed or open for the customer to type in, a currency, a description, and often an expiry date or a usage limit. Back comes a unique URL, usually on the processor's own domain, carrying your business name and logo. The customer pays on it by card or wallet and the money settles into your usual account on your usual payout schedule. The link itself normally costs nothing extra. Since the customer keys the card in, it prices as card-not-present, at your standard online rate rather than the cheaper card-present one, and the invoicing and subscription modules built on top of links are a separate matter, often sold as paid add-ons.
Worked example
A consultant wraps up a $2,400 project and emails a payment link instead of a bank-transfer invoice. The client pays by card that afternoon. On flat-rate pricing of 2.9% + $0.30 the fee is $69.90, and $2,330.10 lands on the normal payout schedule. Offer a bank debit option on the same link and the flat ACH fee of a few dollars keeps roughly $65 more.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need a website to take payments with a payment link?
- No. The payment page belongs to your processor, so all you need is an account and some way to send the URL: email, text message, WhatsApp, a social bio, or a QR code printed on a card. Plenty of freelancers and service businesses run entirely on links and never build a checkout at all.
- Do payment links cost more than a normal online checkout?
- Same rate, almost everywhere: processors price a link as a card-not-present sale, exactly as they price their hosted checkout. The cost sits in the layer above it, an invoicing, subscription or billing module commonly sold as a paid add-on. Check whether the quote you were given covers those features or only the raw transaction.
- Can the same payment link be paid twice?
- Easily, unless you set it to expire or limit it to one use. The URL has no idea who is opening it, so a forwarded email or a refreshed page can produce a second payment, usually from a client's accounts team. Create a single-use link tied to the invoice for anything one-off. For a published price, a reusable link is exactly what you want.