Accept Payments Without a Website

A payment link is a URL that opens a secure payment page for a specific amount, which you send to a customer over WhatsApp, SMS or email. They open it, pay by UPI, card or net banking, and both of you get a confirmation. It needs no website, no app and nothing installed — you create it in your provider's dashboard in under a minute. For a business that sells over WhatsApp and phone calls, this is the fastest route from no online payments at all to collecting properly.

Yes, in three ways. A payment link is a URL you send per bill or per order. A hosted payment page is a permanent page your provider hosts — useful for donations, fees or a standing order form. A dynamic QR shows the exact bill amount at your counter and confirms itself. All three run through a proper merchant account, so you get automatic confirmation, refunds, settlement into your bank and records for GST — none of which a personal UPI ID gives you.

Open your provider's dashboard, choose to create a payment link, enter the amount, a description and optionally the customer's name and phone number, and generate it. Send the link on WhatsApp. The customer pays, you both get a confirmation, and the transaction appears in your dashboard tagged to that link. The whole process takes under a minute per link, and most providers let you generate several at once or set a link to accept any amount.

A payment link from a regulated provider is safer than the alternative it usually replaces, which is transferring money to a personal UPI ID on trust. The payment page is hosted by the provider on their secure domain, card details never reach the merchant, and the customer gets a receipt from a recognisable payment brand. Customers should check that the link opens on the provider's own domain — that single habit defeats most payment-link phishing.

Payment links carry the same per-transaction charges as any other collection method through your gateway — the rate depends on how the customer pays, not on the fact that a link was used. There is normally no separate fee to create links and no setup or annual charge on a standard Indian account. New merchants on Cashfree's current offer pay 0% on domestic transactions up to ₹20 lakh a month until 31 March 2027.

A payment link is created per transaction, usually for a specific amount and a specific customer, and you send it to them. A hosted payment page is permanent and public — a URL you can print on a poster, put in your Instagram bio or link from an email signature — where anyone can pay, often choosing from options you define. Use links for invoices and orders; use a page for fees, donations and anything collected repeatedly from many people.

A standard payment link collects once. For repeating collection you want a subscription or mandate link instead, which asks the customer to authorise a UPI AutoPay or eNACH mandate — after which agreed amounts are debited on schedule without you sending anything. Most providers offer both, and using a one-off link every month for what is really a subscription means chasing the same customer twelve times a year.

You can set an expiry, and for invoices you generally should. An open-ended link for a specific order can be paid weeks later or forwarded to someone else, which creates reconciliation problems that are tedious to unwind. Set an expiry that matches your payment terms, and generate a fresh link if the customer needs more time.

Each link carries the description and reference you set when you create it, so the payment arrives already tagged to that bill or order — which is the main advantage over a shared UPI ID, where every payment looks identical in your statement. Take the per-transaction report from your dashboard into your books rather than reading your bank statement, since a settlement arrives as a batch of many payments net of fees.

Yes — create the link for the advance amount, and a second link for the balance when the work is done or before dispatch. This is how most order-based businesses work: an advance on confirmation and the balance before delivery, each traceable to the same order. It replaces the usual arrangement of chasing a balance on WhatsApp with no record of what was agreed.

For a business, decisively yes. A shared UPI ID gives you no automatic confirmation, so you are checking screenshots — which are forged routinely and are the commonest small-merchant fraud in India. It gives you no refund mechanism, no link between a payment and a bill, no settlement report for GST, and it risks your personal account being frozen for business-like activity. A payment link fixes all of that for a small percentage per transaction.

Anyone selling without a checkout. Shops taking orders on WhatsApp, clinics collecting consultation fees before an appointment, coaching centres collecting term fees, photographers and event businesses collecting advances, consultants invoicing clients, repair services quoting and collecting on site, and wholesalers collecting balances before dispatch. In each case the alternative was a personal UPI ID and a screenshot.