EU-VAT, MOSS, Resellers, and Merchant of Record (MoR) experiences

General JUCE discussion
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Hello all,

Apologies if this is the wrong forum or place to ask this. Quite a few of us are developing audio plugins that are for sale, and this obviously comes with challenges re payment gateways, payment of tax for digital goods, the EU-VAT-MOSS PitA, etc. On top of that, tax rules seem to change on almost a monthly basis (with US states starting to charge tax for digital goods as well). I guess for most of us indies a reseller / Merchant of Record is almost a must for tax compliance and I was curious if there are people around here wanting to share experiences.

Some background: for our plugins we are looking for a MoR that can:

  • take care of tax compliance;
  • act as payment gateway;
  • deliver activation codes to customers;
  • has web APIs so we can query their subscriptions and sales from our own website;
  • is fast (customers don’t have to wait for hours before they get their product after purchase).

We’re experiencing many issues with our current MoR (sending wrong products to the customer, web APIs that are very shaky and returning no or the wrong results, slow payment processing, etc) so we’re looking for a better one.

Anyone wanting to share experiences with MoRs like Fastspring, MyCommerce.com, Avangate/2Checkout, digitalriver.com, and others? Does any of these come recommended?

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It’s a bit of a different use case but having a simple solution for all these problems was one of the reasons for starting our Tracktion Presents program: https://www.tracktion.com/develop/plugin-developers

It takes care of a lot more than just the payment process (marketing, distribution etc.) but might be worth a look if you’re a small indie company looking for a quick way to get in to the market.

5

Edit: Just noticed this is from 6 years ago. Not sure why it was the first in my Latest Topics🤔

I’m currently using 2Checkout and haven’t had any major issues with it, though I’ve heard some negative feedback from others. That said, I handle all the license creation and delivery myself, so not sure how it would apply to your case.

The only minor downside is that 2Checkout redirects users to a separate site for payment. It’s not a huge problem, but FastSpring’s embedded checkout definitely offers a smoother UX.

I’ve noticed a few smaller developers switching to FastSpring lately. Not sure whether it’s due to issues with 2Checkout or just for the better UX.