Total payment volumeTPV

The total dollar value of transactions a platform processes over a period, before the platform's own fees come out.

If a payments platform handles one million purchases averaging 50 dollars each in a month, its total payment volume for the month is 50 million dollars.

The aggregate gross value of all payment transactions a platform processes over a defined period, reported before fees, with no accounting standard governing how refunds, chargebacks, or internal transfers get treated. Gross means before subtracting anything, and a defined period is a set span such as a quarter or a year.

Total payment volume (TPV) is simple in concept and varies in practice:

• What counts, since companies differ on whether refunds, chargebacks, and transfers between accounts are included.
• What period, since volume can be reported monthly, quarterly, or annually.
• What is excluded, such as fees the platform keeps, which are not part of the gross value.

Businesses use it for several purposes:

1. Measuring scale, to show how much money flows through a platform.
2. Setting pricing and limits, since processing terms often depend on volume.
3. Calculating ratios, such as fraud rates and chargeback rates, which use volume or transaction counts as the base.

TPV is sometimes called gross payment volume in some places, and companies define it a little differently.

Total payment volume sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Fraud rate is fraud measured against a base, which can be TPV.
• Chargeback rate is chargebacks measured against volume or transaction count.
• Revenue is what the platform earns from fees, which is much smaller than the volume it processes.