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by Silhouette 1397 days ago
Not really. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

For one thing Paddle is a merchant of record so it's more like "outsource your entire payment system including all the processing of different payment methods and the global tax admin". For a lot of businesses, particularly smaller ones with international sales, that is going to be an attractive option compared to services like Stripe even at this price point.

For another thing Stripe has introduced so many extras that bump up their cut now that some types of business will end up paying quite a bit more than the analogous headline rate. So even if it were an apples to apples comparison the difference on the bottom line still wouldn't be as wide as it might first appear for those merchants.

1 comments

Thanks for the explanation, I missed the tax and other benefits at first glance. I don't have those tax complications personally but I do see the value now.

Having a checkout bundled with paypal/apple pay/card is pretty compelling however.

Wanted to jump on this thread as I actually work in this space and wanted to clear some things up. Another thing with tax solutions added to your stack, is that they purely calculate what you owe, leaving you liable incase there is a miscalculation. Its still up to you to pay this to the relevant authorities.

Paddle handle it all + take full liability. Shoot me a email nick.read @paddle.com if you want a little more info :)

Just curious, how don't you have those tax complications?
Not selling internationally perhaps? If you're only selling to customers in the same place then taxes are often much simpler. You might even be exempt from your country's whole sales tax system until you're big enough to cross a threshold.
I'm referring to the international sales. We only sell within the US, state taxes are relatively easy
You must have quite the setup to calculate state, county, and local taxes.
Most online sellers don't have to handle that themselves, whether they're selling physical goods (your shopping cart like Shopify or WooCommerce will do all the sales tax calculations), or services (most locales don't tax them, and you have to get pretty big to worry about establishing economic nexus in places that do).