Payments, in plain English
Short, jargon-free answers to the payment words that trip people up. No fluff and no sales pitch, just what each thing actually means.
Browse the terms
Search or scroll. Every term links to a one-page explanation.
Chargeback
A card payment a buyer's bank reverses after they dispute it, pulling the money back out of the seller's account, usually with a fee on top.
Crypto payments
Letting buyers pay with cryptocurrency like bitcoin or Monero, with the coins landing in a wallet you control.
Custodial vs non-custodial
Whether someone else holds your crypto for you (custodial) or it lands straight in a wallet only you control (non-custodial).
Goldbacks
Thin, spendable notes with a tiny amount of real gold inside them, used as physical money.
Merchant of record
A company that becomes the official seller of your product, handles sales taxes, and takes a cut of every sale.
No backend
A website with no server of its own running behind it, just the pages a visitor sees.
Pay by mail
Letting a buyer pay by physically mailing you cash, a check, or something of value, tracked like any other order.
Payment gateway
A payment gateway is the piece that carries payment information between your buyer and the payment provider you've chosen.
Payment link
A payment link is a web address a seller creates that opens a page where a buyer can pay.
Payment processor
A payment processor is the company that moves money from your buyer to you when someone pays you online.
Recurring billing (subscriptions)
Recurring billing is when a buyer agrees once to pay on a repeating schedule, and the charge then happens automatically at each interval until someone cancels. It's the payment setup behind subscriptions.
Self-custody
Self-custody means you hold your own crypto yourself instead of letting a company hold it in an account for you. A crypto wallet is the app or device that makes this possible: it keeps the secret code that proves the crypto is yours, so only you can move it.
Settlement
Settlement is the moment the money from a sale actually reaches an account you own.
Stablecoin
A digital currency built to hold a steady value, usually tied to something like the dollar, so it does not swing in price the way other digital money can.
Static site
A website made of finished pages, shown to every visitor exactly as they were saved, with nothing working behind the scenes.
Webhook
An automatic message one website sends another the instant something happens, like a payment going through.
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