12 ms·

I was lucky to be part of the beta for my SaaS (https://turnshift.app https://turnshift.app) and I must say this new feature simplifies things A LOT. Especiall

by vvoyer 5y ago

I was lucky to be part of the beta for my SaaS (https://turnshift.app https://turnshift.app) and I must say this new feature simplifies things A LOT. Especially as a EU business owner, I previously had to sync every VAT tax rate possible, use a complex workflow to know if a customer needed to pay taxes or not, link tax rates to customers, and create taxes reports for my accountant. Stripe tax does all of that automatically, based on the customer full address and VAT numbers. Here's a twitter thread of everything you had to do previously: https://twitter.com/vvoyer/status/1347488977738149888 https://twitter.com/vvoyer/status/1347488977738149888 PS: Yes there were other services (Paddle) providing this (and much more to be honest), but the Stripe API and customization options makes it my go-to solution for integrating payments.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Do you feel like the value is worth with the fee Stripe is charging?
- yannoninator 5y ago
  YES, considering the only best competitor in this space Paddle takes 5%. Taxes is the reason why in the past most EU/UK businesses go to Paddle. Stripe's Tax feature now saves people who were considering Paddle a lot of time now.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - outcoldman 5y ago
    Do you know if Paddle files taxes for you? And just send you 1099? Or it is similar to Stripe Tax, they just collect and you have to file taxes?
    - hijodelsol 5y ago
      Paddle and FastSpring (I found their support to be more helpful than Paddle's but they charge even higher fees), the two solutions commonly used in that space, act as Merchants of Record. Since you are not selling directly to your users you don't have to file the corresponding taxes, just the ones that correspond to the transactions between Paddle/FastSpring and you. But I'm not an accountant and they may change their operations in the future so don't rely on this comment alone.
    - pimterry 5y ago
      I use Paddle, they do file 99% of your taxes for you. In effect, they sell the product to customers, and handle all the tax on that side, for every tax regime in the world. Meanwhile you act as a company with a single B2B client and one invoice a month (covering Paddle's net sales minus 5%) instead of N invoices. They send you an email every month with your 'reverse invoice'. As accountancy goes it's extremely easy, but you do need to do the basic tax filing in your local jurisdiction. That 5% includes all the processing fees, they also have a bunch of useful subscription infrastructure, and they handle customer support for billing issues, which tends to be a substantial percentage of issues as you get larger. So far they've been great, and doing nearly zero accountancy is worth a lot of money to me as an indie dev with a digital product (where you need to know a lot about local digital taxes nowadays). That said, would I do the same at the beginning if this existed a few years ago? Hard to know, but this doesn't look so compelling that I'm likely to switch now.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        How do you find working with Paddle? They've been on our shortlist for a new project and we've heard only positive things from people who actually use them. However, their terms could make any lawyer or company officer who actually read them visibly wince, and so far that has prevented us from engaging with them despite their clear advantages over the traditional payment services.
        pimterry 5y ago
        Are there some specific terms in their legal bits that you're concerned about? Personally, they've mostly been very good. The product works, it was very easy to set up and it does everything out of the box, and it's made sales tax & accountancy almost completely disappear. I have occasionally run into issues or bugs, and their API is a bit of a mess, but nothing show stopping and their team has been reasonably responsive and sorted everything out very reliably. That's noticeably got better & faster recently, I think they're beefed out their support team a lot in the last year or so. If you're selling a new product as a substantial business, I think they're good but there are other options to look at too and there are tradeoffs (5% is high, you could probably do your own customer accountancy etc in house). If you're a solo dev/small indie, or just getting started though I think it's a no-brainer. It's just so much quicker & easier than doing everything yourself.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    That's the reason I use 2Checkout (formerly Avangate). I can issue one invoice a month, in my own currency. That saves a lot of work and aggravation.
  - scubakid 5y ago
    With this new Stripe solution, do you still have to register for licenses to collect tax everywhere and remit the sales tax to various US states and foreign governments? Unless I misunderstand, that still sounds prohibitively onerous for anyone working as a solo dev or very small team..
    - dstick 5y ago
      Not sure how it works in the US but in the EU you don't have to register anything. Just keep tabs of what VAT you collected for what country, and then pay accordingly afterwards. No licenses needed.
      - chrismorgan 5y ago
        How do they keep track of who you are? I presume you need a VAT ID of some form? (From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAT_identification_number#VAT_numbers_of_non-EU_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAT_identification_number#VAT_..., it looks like they’ve crafted it so that many countries’ business numbers can be turned into VAT IDs painlessly, e.g. Canada’s work direct, Australia’s you prefix with a two-digit checksum. I note the conspicuous absence of the USA from the list. I have no idea about US tax.)
      - scubakid 5y ago
        Last time I looked into this, it seemed to me like in the US you would need a separate license for each state you collect sales tax in (before collecting any tax)... and naturally, each state has a different licensing process, and some charge fees to register. For small independent projects, it seemed like kind of a nightmare.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        You don't have to collect tax for states you don't have a presence in. They have no jurisdiction outside their borders.
        5y ago
  - throwokay 5y ago
    I thought Avalara was the leader in this space. What is their pricing, I can't find it on the site.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      What is their pricing, I can't find it on the site. Whatever it is, reading reviews of Avalara suggests it's beyond the level smaller businesses can afford and has also been increasing dramatically from one year to the next for some time. Avalara have a strong web presence because they've always been good at presenting key information like current tax rates and forthcoming changes. Their content marketing is excellent. But as soon as you look for more details about anything they offer, you seem to be straight into "enterprise contact-us sales process" mode.
    - gamblor956 5y ago
      Avalara is expensive. It works out to being cheaper if you have sufficient scale, but it's generally pricier for small businesses. However, that is because you're paying for their customer support, and Avalara customer support is very good. Every issue we've had has been dealt with promptly, including issues where Avalara misfiled a return. (Long story short: they owned up to the mistake and corrected it with the state without any additional cost or penalties to us.)
    - TempAccount234 5y ago
      Personal experience from using Avalara for six months: - Returns were processed via a queued batch job. It could take between 1-3 hours after submitting to process a return. Avalara had a countdown clock on their website showing the estimated hours/minutes remaining until the return would get processed. I have seen the countdown clock show 1-3 hours plenty of times (quite frustrating). This was the case 6-12 months ago. Perhaps Avalara has fixed this issue since. - The 1-3 hour wait made filing quite difficult when the original return had an error. Submitting a second return to cancel the first required another 1-3 hour wait. Then submitting the final (third) return required another 1-3 hour wait. Filing one state easily turned into a whole day ordeal if there was an error. - Support from level one/two staff for difficult tax questions did not help. Level one/two staff gave a vocal repeat from the online help guide. Level three support was acceptable however. - Tax returns filed with Avalara are done via a rather cumbersome spreadsheet. Don't expect someone to hold your hand. Rather, it requires many trial and error submissions to figure out how to make the Avalara engine work. Note: A basic "shipping product" business like Amazon/Walmart would do fairly well with Avalara. However, a company that does complex construction projects will have challenges. We ended up reverting to filing taxes manually.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    Here's some current Stripe UK pricing, confirmed on their site today. Baseline of 2.9% + £0.20 for international card payments. (It's reduced to 1.4% + 20p for European cards.) Add 2% for currency conversion. The exchange rate used is stated as "the daily mid-market rate provided by our service providers". Add 0.5% for Billing if you're using subscriptions. Add 0.5% more if you're using this new Stripe Tax functionality. That is significantly over 5% for a typical SaaS or merchant selling digital content online, making international sales in multiple currencies. Given that merchant of record services like Paddle are providing functionality far more comprehensive than Stripe Tax appears to be, they're still going to be attractive for smaller merchants compared to the more traditional PSPs like Stripe. It's probably worth pointing out that while the EU has a long track record of making VAT difficult for everyone, plenty of other countries around the world and even some smaller regions seem to be jumping on the bandwagon lately. If all of these governments start attempting to enforce their local laws extra-territorially (leaving aside any questions about the legality and/or morality of doing so for this discussion) without also introducing reasonable de minimis thresholds to avoid grossly disproportionate compliance costs for negligible extra tax revenues in low volume situations, the situation could get very messy. If that does happen and businesses are forced to comply with all rules globally regardless of actual sales volumes, I don't see how the model uses by traditional PSPs like Stripe has any chance of surviving. Every small business will have to sell via intermediaries like Paddle to shift the tax responsibilities to a larger business with the resources to deal with it, and pay whatever premium the market decides that justifies on all affected international sales.
    - sudhirj 5y ago
      The tipping point is the 2% for currency conversion, but keep in mind that this is happening either way on Paddle as well, just not going to Paddle. Paddle takes 5%, then the entity that converts from USD to your currency (Payoneer / wire transfer bank) takes the 2% or more. Stripe calls it out clearly and gives you your money in your own currency.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        If you're selling a B2C service (so the really horrible tax rules apply) for say £10/month, that extra £0.20 is another 2%. Stripe's total cut for an international sale with currency conversion is then nearly 8%, even if you don't use any of their other services with their own extra costs and you never have any refund or chargeback costs to amortize. Stripe is crazy expensive these days. (There are other parts in the fees charged by other services as well, but those also aren't like for like comparisons. I'm just saying that 5% as a baseline wouldn't necessarily be that high compared to services like Stripe.)
  - pier25 5y ago
    What about invoicing to the customer? AFAIK Paddle solves that too but Stripe doesn't.
    - lemming 5y ago
      Paddle does have a solution to this but it is what I would consider to be in eternal alpha - it's functional (barely) but it drives me insane every time I have to use it.
ttoinou 5y ago
report taxes. Stripe tax does all of that It doesn't say they file the taxes for you. "Speed up filing and remittance with comprehensive reports" means they will help you with it, but not do it for you. Later on the website : "Stripe reports surface all the information you need for each filing location, so you can easily file and remit taxes on your own, with your accountant, or with a preferred partner. US filing partner TaxJar EU filing partners Taxually Marosa"
- vvoyer 5y ago
  Thanks, I updated my comment.
- ______- 5y ago
  > It doesn't say they file the taxes for you Yay for automation, but is using third parties to file taxes not open to fraud and potential error (if you don't do it yourself?)
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    Gusto files your taxes for you.
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    I pay TaxJar to prepare and file my sales tax returns for me. Stripe just acquired them in April.
  - hobs 5y ago
    Literally all companies pay other people (accountants, lawyers) to do their taxes and in many cases they are third parties so no, that is not the case. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/third-party-authorization-purpose https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
    - cperciva 5y ago
      Not literally all. I can name several small businesses which do their own taxes.
revorad 5y ago
I was part of the beta too for my education site (https://learnetto.com https://learnetto.com) and I couldn't agree more - Stripe has done a stellar job.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
The downside is of course that Stripe takes over more and more of your important infrastructure. A question should always be how to include several suppliers and/or how to change supplier in order not to put all in your eggs in a single basket.
- yannoninator 5y ago
  The cost of letting Stripe do all the work than moving over to another provider is extremely costly and can damage sales. Unless your provider really sucks, it's always important to evaluate carefully and ideally stick with them unless it is really that bad.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    > The cost of letting Stripe do all the work than moving over to another provider is extremely costly and can damage sales. Yes, that's exactly my point: At some point you are completely locked in with a single supplier that holds your entire income stream and perhaps even more than that. Ideally (easier said that done, I know) you want to have at least 2 suppliers for any key piece of infrastructure as early as possible and to avoid letting a supplier 'expand' the number of tasks they do for you too much. The latter seems to be Stripe's strategy: They start with payments then expand step by step in everything related et even in things like company incorporation.
    - staticassertion 5y ago
      I imagine that most businesses have bigger risks to deal with than this, especially in early to mid stages (where Stripe seems to target).
      - mytailorisrich 5y ago
        Perhaps. You should always keep that in mind, though, and avoid building your system tightly-coupled to any single supplier.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pier25 5y ago
So what are the advantages of Paddle?
- usaphp 5y ago
  They support PayPal
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Most importantly, they become the merchant of record. In other words, they're a separate legal entity reselling your product to your end customer, and therefore they are the ones who deal with almost all of the corresponding tax and legal responsibilities. You then deal with them through a B2B relationship, in which they give you you the collected revenues minus their fees every now and then, and you provide your product to the customers they've sold it to in return. Your own accounts and tax responsibilities are dramatically simplified as a result, though typically with a merchant of record arrangement (with Paddle or any other) you trade that off against some loss of control and higher fees.
devops000 5y ago
I think you still need to collect VAT ID on your website and associate it to a stripe customer
- edwinwee 5y ago
  Nope, no need! Tax ID is validated when you accept the payment: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/checkout#create-session https://stripe.com/docs/tax/checkout#create-session.
  - vvoyer 5y ago
    Precision: if you're using Stripe checkout only. On a custom integration you do need to get the customer VAT ID and add it to your Stripe customer
  - devops000 5y ago
    Wao! Does it works for metered-usage plans too?

by vvoyer 5y ago

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Do you feel like the value is worth with the fee Stripe is charging?

yannoninator 5y ago
YES, considering the only best competitor in this space Paddle takes 5%. Taxes is the reason why in the past most EU/UK businesses go to Paddle. Stripe's Tax feature now saves people who were considering Paddle a lot of time now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- outcoldman 5y ago
  Do you know if Paddle files taxes for you? And just send you 1099? Or it is similar to Stripe Tax, they just collect and you have to file taxes?
  - hijodelsol 5y ago
    Paddle and FastSpring (I found their support to be more helpful than Paddle's but they charge even higher fees), the two solutions commonly used in that space, act as Merchants of Record. Since you are not selling directly to your users you don't have to file the corresponding taxes, just the ones that correspond to the transactions between Paddle/FastSpring and you. But I'm not an accountant and they may change their operations in the future so don't rely on this comment alone.
  - pimterry 5y ago
    I use Paddle, they do file 99% of your taxes for you. In effect, they sell the product to customers, and handle all the tax on that side, for every tax regime in the world. Meanwhile you act as a company with a single B2B client and one invoice a month (covering Paddle's net sales minus 5%) instead of N invoices. They send you an email every month with your 'reverse invoice'. As accountancy goes it's extremely easy, but you do need to do the basic tax filing in your local jurisdiction. That 5% includes all the processing fees, they also have a bunch of useful subscription infrastructure, and they handle customer support for billing issues, which tends to be a substantial percentage of issues as you get larger. So far they've been great, and doing nearly zero accountancy is worth a lot of money to me as an indie dev with a digital product (where you need to know a lot about local digital taxes nowadays). That said, would I do the same at the beginning if this existed a few years ago? Hard to know, but this doesn't look so compelling that I'm likely to switch now.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      How do you find working with Paddle? They've been on our shortlist for a new project and we've heard only positive things from people who actually use them. However, their terms could make any lawyer or company officer who actually read them visibly wince, and so far that has prevented us from engaging with them despite their clear advantages over the traditional payment services.
      - pimterry 5y ago
        Are there some specific terms in their legal bits that you're concerned about? Personally, they've mostly been very good. The product works, it was very easy to set up and it does everything out of the box, and it's made sales tax & accountancy almost completely disappear. I have occasionally run into issues or bugs, and their API is a bit of a mess, but nothing show stopping and their team has been reasonably responsive and sorted everything out very reliably. That's noticeably got better & faster recently, I think they're beefed out their support team a lot in the last year or so. If you're selling a new product as a substantial business, I think they're good but there are other options to look at too and there are tradeoffs (5% is high, you could probably do your own customer accountancy etc in house). If you're a solo dev/small indie, or just getting started though I think it's a no-brainer. It's just so much quicker & easier than doing everything yourself.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  That's the reason I use 2Checkout (formerly Avangate). I can issue one invoice a month, in my own currency. That saves a lot of work and aggravation.
- scubakid 5y ago
  With this new Stripe solution, do you still have to register for licenses to collect tax everywhere and remit the sales tax to various US states and foreign governments? Unless I misunderstand, that still sounds prohibitively onerous for anyone working as a solo dev or very small team..
  - dstick 5y ago
    Not sure how it works in the US but in the EU you don't have to register anything. Just keep tabs of what VAT you collected for what country, and then pay accordingly afterwards. No licenses needed.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      How do they keep track of who you are? I presume you need a VAT ID of some form? (From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAT_identification_number#VAT_numbers_of_non-EU_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAT_identification_number#VAT_..., it looks like they’ve crafted it so that many countries’ business numbers can be turned into VAT IDs painlessly, e.g. Canada’s work direct, Australia’s you prefix with a two-digit checksum. I note the conspicuous absence of the USA from the list. I have no idea about US tax.)
    - scubakid 5y ago
      Last time I looked into this, it seemed to me like in the US you would need a separate license for each state you collect sales tax in (before collecting any tax)... and naturally, each state has a different licensing process, and some charge fees to register. For small independent projects, it seemed like kind of a nightmare.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        You don't have to collect tax for states you don't have a presence in. They have no jurisdiction outside their borders.
        5y ago
- throwokay 5y ago
  I thought Avalara was the leader in this space. What is their pricing, I can't find it on the site.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    What is their pricing, I can't find it on the site. Whatever it is, reading reviews of Avalara suggests it's beyond the level smaller businesses can afford and has also been increasing dramatically from one year to the next for some time. Avalara have a strong web presence because they've always been good at presenting key information like current tax rates and forthcoming changes. Their content marketing is excellent. But as soon as you look for more details about anything they offer, you seem to be straight into "enterprise contact-us sales process" mode.
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    Avalara is expensive. It works out to being cheaper if you have sufficient scale, but it's generally pricier for small businesses. However, that is because you're paying for their customer support, and Avalara customer support is very good. Every issue we've had has been dealt with promptly, including issues where Avalara misfiled a return. (Long story short: they owned up to the mistake and corrected it with the state without any additional cost or penalties to us.)
  - TempAccount234 5y ago
    Personal experience from using Avalara for six months: - Returns were processed via a queued batch job. It could take between 1-3 hours after submitting to process a return. Avalara had a countdown clock on their website showing the estimated hours/minutes remaining until the return would get processed. I have seen the countdown clock show 1-3 hours plenty of times (quite frustrating). This was the case 6-12 months ago. Perhaps Avalara has fixed this issue since. - The 1-3 hour wait made filing quite difficult when the original return had an error. Submitting a second return to cancel the first required another 1-3 hour wait. Then submitting the final (third) return required another 1-3 hour wait. Filing one state easily turned into a whole day ordeal if there was an error. - Support from level one/two staff for difficult tax questions did not help. Level one/two staff gave a vocal repeat from the online help guide. Level three support was acceptable however. - Tax returns filed with Avalara are done via a rather cumbersome spreadsheet. Don't expect someone to hold your hand. Rather, it requires many trial and error submissions to figure out how to make the Avalara engine work. Note: A basic "shipping product" business like Amazon/Walmart would do fairly well with Avalara. However, a company that does complex construction projects will have challenges. We ended up reverting to filing taxes manually.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Here's some current Stripe UK pricing, confirmed on their site today. Baseline of 2.9% + £0.20 for international card payments. (It's reduced to 1.4% + 20p for European cards.) Add 2% for currency conversion. The exchange rate used is stated as "the daily mid-market rate provided by our service providers". Add 0.5% for Billing if you're using subscriptions. Add 0.5% more if you're using this new Stripe Tax functionality. That is significantly over 5% for a typical SaaS or merchant selling digital content online, making international sales in multiple currencies. Given that merchant of record services like Paddle are providing functionality far more comprehensive than Stripe Tax appears to be, they're still going to be attractive for smaller merchants compared to the more traditional PSPs like Stripe. It's probably worth pointing out that while the EU has a long track record of making VAT difficult for everyone, plenty of other countries around the world and even some smaller regions seem to be jumping on the bandwagon lately. If all of these governments start attempting to enforce their local laws extra-territorially (leaving aside any questions about the legality and/or morality of doing so for this discussion) without also introducing reasonable de minimis thresholds to avoid grossly disproportionate compliance costs for negligible extra tax revenues in low volume situations, the situation could get very messy. If that does happen and businesses are forced to comply with all rules globally regardless of actual sales volumes, I don't see how the model uses by traditional PSPs like Stripe has any chance of surviving. Every small business will have to sell via intermediaries like Paddle to shift the tax responsibilities to a larger business with the resources to deal with it, and pay whatever premium the market decides that justifies on all affected international sales.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    The tipping point is the 2% for currency conversion, but keep in mind that this is happening either way on Paddle as well, just not going to Paddle. Paddle takes 5%, then the entity that converts from USD to your currency (Payoneer / wire transfer bank) takes the 2% or more. Stripe calls it out clearly and gives you your money in your own currency.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      If you're selling a B2C service (so the really horrible tax rules apply) for say £10/month, that extra £0.20 is another 2%. Stripe's total cut for an international sale with currency conversion is then nearly 8%, even if you don't use any of their other services with their own extra costs and you never have any refund or chargeback costs to amortize. Stripe is crazy expensive these days. (There are other parts in the fees charged by other services as well, but those also aren't like for like comparisons. I'm just saying that 5% as a baseline wouldn't necessarily be that high compared to services like Stripe.)
- pier25 5y ago
  What about invoicing to the customer? AFAIK Paddle solves that too but Stripe doesn't.
  - lemming 5y ago
    Paddle does have a solution to this but it is what I would consider to be in eternal alpha - it's functional (barely) but it drives me insane every time I have to use it.

ttoinou 5y ago

report taxes. Stripe tax does all of that It doesn't say they file the taxes for you. "Speed up filing and remittance with comprehensive reports" means they will help you with it, but not do it for you. Later on the website : "Stripe reports surface all the information you need for each filing location, so you can easily file and remit taxes on your own, with your accountant, or with a preferred partner. US filing partner TaxJar EU filing partners Taxually Marosa"

vvoyer 5y ago
Thanks, I updated my comment.
______- 5y ago
> It doesn't say they file the taxes for you Yay for automation, but is using third parties to file taxes not open to fraud and potential error (if you don't do it yourself?)
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Gusto files your taxes for you.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  I pay TaxJar to prepare and file my sales tax returns for me. Stripe just acquired them in April.
- hobs 5y ago
  Literally all companies pay other people (accountants, lawyers) to do their taxes and in many cases they are third parties so no, that is not the case. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/third-party-authorization-purpose https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
  - cperciva 5y ago
    Not literally all. I can name several small businesses which do their own taxes.

revorad 5y ago

I was part of the beta too for my education site (https://learnetto.com https://learnetto.com) and I couldn't agree more - Stripe has done a stellar job.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

The downside is of course that Stripe takes over more and more of your important infrastructure. A question should always be how to include several suppliers and/or how to change supplier in order not to put all in your eggs in a single basket.

yannoninator 5y ago
The cost of letting Stripe do all the work than moving over to another provider is extremely costly and can damage sales. Unless your provider really sucks, it's always important to evaluate carefully and ideally stick with them unless it is really that bad.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  > The cost of letting Stripe do all the work than moving over to another provider is extremely costly and can damage sales. Yes, that's exactly my point: At some point you are completely locked in with a single supplier that holds your entire income stream and perhaps even more than that. Ideally (easier said that done, I know) you want to have at least 2 suppliers for any key piece of infrastructure as early as possible and to avoid letting a supplier 'expand' the number of tasks they do for you too much. The latter seems to be Stripe's strategy: They start with payments then expand step by step in everything related et even in things like company incorporation.
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    I imagine that most businesses have bigger risks to deal with than this, especially in early to mid stages (where Stripe seems to target).
    - mytailorisrich 5y ago
      Perhaps. You should always keep that in mind, though, and avoid building your system tightly-coupled to any single supplier.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pier25 5y ago

So what are the advantages of Paddle?

usaphp 5y ago
They support PayPal
Silhouette 5y ago
Most importantly, they become the merchant of record. In other words, they're a separate legal entity reselling your product to your end customer, and therefore they are the ones who deal with almost all of the corresponding tax and legal responsibilities. You then deal with them through a B2B relationship, in which they give you you the collected revenues minus their fees every now and then, and you provide your product to the customers they've sold it to in return. Your own accounts and tax responsibilities are dramatically simplified as a result, though typically with a merchant of record arrangement (with Paddle or any other) you trade that off against some loss of control and higher fees.

devops000 5y ago

I think you still need to collect VAT ID on your website and associate it to a stripe customer

edwinwee 5y ago
Nope, no need! Tax ID is validated when you accept the payment: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/checkout#create-session https://stripe.com/docs/tax/checkout#create-session.
- vvoyer 5y ago
  Precision: if you're using Stripe checkout only. On a custom integration you do need to get the customer VAT ID and add it to your Stripe customer
- devops000 5y ago
  Wao! Does it works for metered-usage plans too?