n-Adyen Pay by Link Skips the Checkout Page. It Doesn’t Skip What Happens After Payment.
Pay by Link is Adyen's feature for generating a shareable payment link, sent by email, text, or over the phone, that opens a hosted payment page without the business needing to build or embed a checkout flow at all. It's a common fit for phone orders, invoices, and deposits where there's no live shopping cart to check out from. Once that link gets paid, the payment still has to land somewhere, as a fulfilled order, a marked-paid invoice, a logged deposit, and that part doesn't happen automatically just because the link cleared.
What Pay by Link actually is
A link is generated through Adyen's dashboard or its API, tied to a specific amount and reference you choose, and sent however makes sense for the business, by text, email, or read out as a URL over the phone. The customer completes payment on a hosted page, and the business never handles the card data directly.
Where it leaves a gap
Because there's no cart or checkout flow feeding the payment, whatever a Pay by Link transaction is actually for, an invoice, a phone order, a deposit against a job, usually lives in a completely different system. Matching a paid link back to that record is often a manual lookup in Adyen's dashboard unless something's built to do it automatically.
What this looks like built
A paid link, matched automatically
A paid Pay by Link transaction gets matched to the invoice or order it was for the moment it clears, instead of someone checking Adyen's dashboard against a list of open invoices to see what came in.
Link generation without the manual step
A link gets generated and sent the moment an order or invoice needs payment, pulled straight from the system that tracks it, instead of someone copying an amount into Adyen's dashboard by hand every time.
Sending Adyen payment links for phone orders or invoices and matching them up afterward by hand?
Tell us how many links go out in a typical week and what happens once one gets paid. That's usually where the fix needs to start.
Sending payment links through Adyen and still checking which ones got paid by hand?
Pay by Link does the collecting. Knowing what each payment was for still takes a system that connects the two, unless someone builds it. Tell us how links fit into your actual workflow, and if links aren't where the real friction is, that's fine too; we automate whatever's manual.
Let's talk