Money

A preliminary contract: the wording can still change before the pilot.

You run an online business, and you are deciding whether it is worth putting your goods where programs do the buying. The money side of that decision is collected here: where the payments arrive, at what moment the buyer is charged, what you are risking while that happens, and what we take.

Where the money arrives

The money goes from the buyer's wallet — the buyer is a program, buying on behalf of a person — straight to your wallet. Coinslot never holds it: we check the payment and we set it going, and it passes through no account of ours on the way. So there is no payout here, no settlement period, and no balance sitting with us that has to be withdrawn.

Every payment arrives as its own transfer. A hundred sales are a hundred incoming transfers: if your accounting is used to one line per period, there will be as many lines here as there were sales.

What they pay in

Buyers pay in a stablecoin — a digital dollar, meaning money whose rate is pegged to the dollar. For you that means the sum the buyer saw at the moment of purchase and the sum that lands in your wallet are the same: nothing is converted at a rate in between.

These payments have one more property worth knowing in advance: the transfer is final. A buyer cannot reverse it the way a charge on a bank card is reversed, because these payments have no such mechanism at all. The case familiar from bank cards, where money is taken back off your account a month after the sale and you are left proving the goods went out, does not happen here. Whatever you give back, you give back yourself and by your own decision.

Which digital dollar we use, and which network the transfers run over, is not chosen yet. Who pays the network fee and how that fee sits against the price of the goods follows from the same question; both are in the list at the bottom of this page.

When the money reaches you

It depends on the product. For some goods the money arrives after you have delivered: the payment executes as the last step of the purchase, and if the delivery did not work out, the purchase simply did not happen — the buyer spent nothing and you owe nobody anything. For the rest the money arrives at the moment of purchase, ahead of your delivery, and then a product that was never delivered leaves a debt: such an order is marked as needing a refund.

Which of the two comes first is your choice, and you make it product by product — it is written in the card for that product, the description a catalogue shows a buyer, alongside its price. There is no switch for the whole shop: one product can be paid for after delivery and the one next to it before.

Say you sell a month of access for five dollars (an example figure). If the access goes to the buyer in the answer to the purchase, those five dollars reach your wallet after your side has handed it over. If preparing the access takes minutes or hours, the same five dollars arrive at the moment of purchase and you deliver later.

A third arrangement exists, for goods you hand over yourself, and it arrives after the pilot. Before any money moves you are asked whether you will deliver; until you answer yes nothing is charged, and after your yes the money arrives at once, with the delivery still ahead of it.

One rule covers all three. While your answer comes before the money, your silence costs the buyer nothing. After the charge, that same silence leaves them without the goods — what that looks like in each separate failure is on What can go wrong. The exact moments of charging are collected in a table for your engineer on Orders and fulfillment modes.

You delivered and the money did not arrive

This is possible for goods that are paid for after your delivery. We check the payment first — the signature and the funds — then hand you the order, receive the goods and only then execute the payment. Time passes between the check and the execution, and in that gap the funds can leave the buyer's wallet for something else.

What it can cost you is the price of one sale, so the only thing you have to weigh here is how expensive and how irreversible your delivery is. Access you can revoke and a parcel already on its way are worth different amounts to you.

You hear about such a case from us: we tell you the money did not arrive. There is no need to reconcile the transfers into your wallet against what you delivered by hand.

Sometimes that is the whole of what anybody knows. Where the payment network was asked and never answered, nobody can say whether the buyer was charged, and the case can stay that way — so taking back what you gave out may be taking it from somebody who paid for it. That is the case to weigh when you decide how irreversible a delivery of yours should be.

Putting the money first closes the case. For a product paid for ahead of the delivery, the charge happens at the moment of purchase and you never deliver anything unpaid. Which comes first is yours to choose product by product, in the card, and we do not set a general rule on your behalf.

What proves a sale happened

A sale that went through leaves a receipt — a record of the payment, written at the moment the goods are released. It shows what was bought and for how much; to the buyer it is proof of payment, to you it is the record a dispute is settled from. The price the sale went through at goes into the receipt and stays there unchanged even after your price has moved.

An order paid for and never delivered leaves no receipt, because no goods went out. What you have for that case is the order itself and the event telling you a refund is owed.

Receipts matter for repeats too. The answer to a purchase is sometimes lost on the way: the buyer paid and the goods did not reach them because the connection dropped. The agent then repeats the purchase and receives what has already been delivered. There is no second charge, and we do not ask you for a second delivery. Which key we recognise a repeat by is in Telling a repeat apart.

If the buyer did not get the goods

You return the money for an undelivered product to the buyer yourself, out of your own wallet. It cannot be otherwise: the payment came from them straight to you, it never passed through our accounts, and we are in no position to give back what we never held. Our part of the work is to record the obligation and hand you the record — which order, for how much, and why it was left undelivered. That covers both the orders you did not manage to deliver in time and the orders still open at the moment you leave.

How the money travels back is something we settle before the pilot: we are looking at how working sellers do it and taking a pattern that works. What exactly you do during a refund is not decided, and it is the largest open item in the money contract.

Until there is a way, the pilot's rule applies — the one we ask about when you connect (What we will ask you): only goods that can be delivered a second time are paid for in advance, and we repeat the attempt to deliver, up to a limit, until the deadline named in the card. The rule narrows the case without removing it: an order that could not be delivered at all remains possible. We tell you about every such order separately, and during the pilot there are few of them — but not none, and each one is dealt with by hand.

What we take

We take no percentage of the payments, and there is nowhere for one to come from: the money goes past us. We earn on the tools and on a subscription — on what you use, not on what you sold. We name the price of the subscription and what it covers before you connect; today it is an open item at the bottom of this page.

What is not settled yet

• Which digital dollar and which transfer network; who pays the network fee and how it sits against the price of the goods.
• How you send money back for an undelivered order, and how we learn that you have.
• Reconciling what came in against what was sold. A receipt follows the goods, so an order paid for and not delivered has none, and matching the transfers into your wallet against the orders is still yours to do by hand.
• The price of the subscription and what it covers.
• Who counts as the seller on paper, what document your accounting receives for a sale, and how a stablecoin payment is reported.