Payment Links, QR Codes or API: Which Checkout Do You Need?
Three ways to ask a customer for money, and the right answer is usually more than one. Here is which fits where, and what each actually costs you to run.
There are three ways to ask a customer to pay you in crypto. They are not competing options so much as different tools, and most businesses end up running two of them.
Payment links
What it is. You create a link with an amount, send it however you already talk to the customer, and they pay on a hosted page.
Best for. Invoices, first payments, deals agreed over a call, anything low volume or one-off. Also the fastest way to prove the whole thing works before writing any code.
The cost. Somebody has to create and send each one, and match the payment to the customer afterwards. Fine at ten a month, painful at a thousand.
QR codes
What it is. A code encoding the address and amount. The customer scans it with their wallet and approves.
Best for. Anywhere a person is physically in front of you. A counter, a hotel desk, a market stall, a table.
The real benefit. It removes hand-typed addresses, which are the single most common way crypto payments go wrong. A scanned code cannot be mistyped.
API
What it is. Your system creates the payment, receives an address, shows it in your own checkout, and listens for a signed webhook telling it the money arrived.
Best for. Anything routine. Online checkout, subscriptions, marketplaces, anywhere an order needs to move state on its own.
The cost. An afternoon of engineering, and less than that if you hand the documentation to a coding assistant. The surface is one pay-in call, one webhook and one signing scheme.
How to choose
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| You have not taken a crypto payment yet | A link. Today. |
| Invoicing business customers | Links |
| Somebody standing at a counter | QR |
| An online store with regular orders | API |
| Paying out to many people | API, with batched payouts |
What people get wrong
Building the API integration first. Take one payment on a link before you write anything. It surfaces the questions that matter and it takes ten minutes.
Trusting the callback without checking it. Whichever route you use, if your server acts on a webhook it must verify the signature first. Otherwise anyone who finds the endpoint can mark orders paid.
Treating them as exclusive. Run the API for the main flow and keep links for everything that falls outside it. They cost nothing to have available.
When you are ready to build, the integration path is here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the easiest way to start accepting crypto payments?
A payment link. You create it in the dashboard, send the URL, and the customer pays. There is nothing to build and nothing to deploy, which makes it the fastest route from signing up to receiving money.
When should a business use an API instead of payment links?
Once payments are routine rather than occasional. An API integration creates the payment automatically at checkout, matches it to an order, and updates the order when the webhook arrives, so nobody has to send a link or reconcile by hand.
How do QR code crypto payments work?
The code encodes the receiving address and the amount. The customer scans it with their wallet, which fills both in, and they approve. It removes the most common failure in crypto payments, which is a hand-typed address.
Can I use payment links and an API together?
Yes, and most businesses do. The API handles the main checkout while links cover invoices, over-the-phone sales and anything that happens outside the normal flow.