What I'm looking for from this thread: someone comments about their payment processor experience and chimes in with something like "hey I built a thing, and here's what I really like about the folks I use, for reasons A, B, and C." or even someone who has something like "I used processor A, but this thing happened and I ended up switching to processor B"
Valuable info for me to know would be:
- Average processing volume per month
- Average transaction total
- Price of the most expensive item you sell
- Price of the least expensive item you sell
I've tried querying a few search engines, but all the results I've found contain some form of affiliate marketing, link codes, and things that in general make me disregard the sincerity of the testimonial.
The major reason I use Paddle over Stripe is Paddle deal with all EU VAT and other country specific tax + admin for you which Stripe still don't (as far as I know). If you're a small team or solo, you really don't want to be burdened with the extra work here and the scope for complicated and scary tax related mistakes.
Each month Paddle send me a single payment and I record those as business income - that's it, done.
Edit: Pricing is 5% + $0.50 per transaction. As far as I know, Fastspring is more expensive and Gumroad is cheaper, and both take care of tax for you the same as Paddle.
do check https://www.chargebee.com/launch/ if you are new and planning to launch a new business.
[edit]-added a relevant link
In my case I only sold to one country within the EU which is my home country and therefore I didn’t have any problems with EU taxes and stuff like that. If you plan to sell in the EU from outside or to multiple EU countries I’d strongly recommend a merchant of record.
The most known I think is Paddle, as also mentioned in this thread. But their pricing is hidden deep inside their ToS and in general you don’t get that many information just from the website, best to contact their sales department and check with them if they would like to onboard you. But it’s definitely more expensive than Stripe for fees but in my opinion you’ll save that money in accounting as you only get one invoice per month and don’t have to worry about taxes in X countries.
Also a small tip, check if your country has laws on “fake self-employment” (Scheinselbständigkeit in German) because I know for a fact that some (at least German) finance authorities don’t understand how a merchant of record works because even though you have multiple customers, on the paper you only have one, Paddle.
Stripe but most of my customers don't use it unless they want to pay by credit card.
Everybody else direct bank deposit. Xero does all the payment matching although that semi manual process likely wouldn't scale into thousands of customers.