Payments

Payments are invisible when they work and existential when they do not. A failed payout costs you an affiliate. A chargeback costs you the sale plus a fee. A processor that will not support your country costs you the whole market. None of that shows up in a feature comparison.

The articles here cover the parts that bite. How online payments actually move, from authorisation through settlement, so you can tell a decline from a hold from a genuine failure. Cross-border payouts, where fees and delays are usually worse than advertised and vary enormously by corridor. Subscription billing, dunning and involuntary churn, which quietly destroys more recurring revenue than cancellations do.

There is also a practical strand on choosing infrastructure: Stripe Connect for platforms that pay third parties, merchant-of-record providers like Paddle that take on the tax burden, and where the tradeoff between control and compliance sits for a small team.

Fraud gets its own coverage. Ecommerce fraud, affiliate fraud and friendly fraud each need a different defence, and the controls that stop one will not touch the others.