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Anyone used Paddle?
by
Belhassen Chelbi
Have you used Paddle for your business?
We use Stripe + Quaderno (the latter handles all that VAT stuff) at Friendly.is because we want to OWN the customer relationship.
If you use a service like Paddle, THEY own the relationship. "Your" customer effectively is a customer of Paddle then, not yours. Similar to how it is when you sell an app through Apples IAP system.
If anyone finds an alternative to Quaderno that really is transaction based I'd be super interested. Even their "hobby" plans has a fix monthly cost.
Well, their tiers are based on the numbers of transactions you have so…
True - but I am just looking for an alternative where you pay solely per transaction. That's what I would call purely/truly/really transaction based.
I'm using Paddle for a year.
PRO:
CON:
+1 on the tips by @codexpert to reach out to their support and ask them not to auto refund and to forward you all the refund requests. (It happen they do full refund to people asking for a partial refund because they were not able to use a coupon during checkout)
We've been using Paddle for all of our sites. Its easy to use but reporting is bad.
Pro Tip: Reach out to their support and ask them not to auto refund.
Can you show me your website?
Sure, https://wpsmartpay.com (Digital Production + Payment form plugin for WordPress)
https://wpsmartpay.com/paddle-for-woocommerce/
https://wpsmartpay.com/paddle-for-easydigitaldownloads/
and
https://www.thrivedesk.com
Oh man! Congrats on your products. I love the thrivedesk landing page. Well done!
Thanks man, If you need customer support solution feel free to DM me :)
I switched from Chargebee+Stripe+PayPal to Paddle for https://www.dynablogger.com/ and I am super happy. It's just easier and I don't have to worry about taxes. That alone is already worth the extra %.
We are using Paddle from the beginning on Dorik . Working fine for us so far.
Oh wow. That's a really good tool. When did you launch it?
Thanks!
We have started giving early access about a year ago. Launched for everyone last August. :)
I wish you all the best. I'll check it out
In addition to @rb242bs Paddle support doesn't exist :) You have to wait few days to get a reply from them.
We've made the biggest paddle + WordPress integration now working on billing system with paddle. Their API sucks :(
Paddle only have one payment success hook for all your products. For one owner account only one hook, so every successful payment from all products (from different websites) all go to single hook. Everytime I create a new webapp I need to go update the hook function to add a if condition for new product.. that is worst thing.
I can only agree here.
We started using it recently because of the merchant-of-record model and the sales tax benefits it provides us. Happy so far, but we've only been using it for 2 weeks with a handful of upgrades.
I will say there's no documentation about integrating it with a backend. There's API docs, but you need to figure out how to tie the paddle checkout session / customer to a user yourself, and the obvious way is not secure.
I do for my apps.
The fees are $0.5 + 5%.
The dashboard (to view and manage sales, coupons, refunds, etc..) and support are great, Plus they handle all sales and VAT taxes.
All in all I'm happy with their service, but could wish for lower fees.
Well, with everything they provide, It's a pretty reasonable fee. Thanks you Rony 🙏
I did for analyticstally.com
That looks cool! What's the transaction fee?
I think it's same as stripe + taxes
Yeah, I do!
Do you have any specific questions about Paddle? 🙃
Hi, do they have some sort of "collection of purchased products" the users can return to if/when they want to re-download/update? That'd be Gumroad's equivalent of their "Library". I heard that releasing updates with Paddle is a wee bit of a pain in the butt. For instance FastSpring has this concept of a single download link, which 9 out of 10 customers lose after a week and this leads to unnecessary support tickets.
Hey! This is a great question!
Not sure I would be a good help here as my product is a subscription-based SaaS.
Just out of curiosity I tried to create a one-time purchase product and bought it.
Paddle sent me 2 emails, one with the receipt and one with the direct download link to the product. Then I tried to update the product (uploaded a new file). So the download link that Paddle has sent to me now is downloading the new file.
Also, Paddle has a customer portal (https://my.paddle.com/). You can use the email you used to purchase something to log in. There you will see all the purchased products with the download links. Maybe this is what you're referring to?
Hope it was helpful 🙌
Thanks, very helpful indeed—so they have a mixed FastSpring/Gumroad approach. FS renews the link (which normally expires in 7 days or after X downloads or when too many IPs are trying to download the product, as a safety measure), and Gumroad has some sort of customer's page where they group all the products one has bought so they can get them in case they've lost the installer. Thanks again!
The transaction fee. Also, can you share your tool?
How does their dashboard look like
Hey!
So, the fee is $0.5 + 5%. Also, they take out VAT automatically from every purchase. Given that, let’s say you sell an $11 product. Paddle fee on this product would be $1.05, and VAT (assuming we are talking about some European country) would be around ~20%, so something like $1.83. You would get $8.12 paid out to you.
UPD: You also have the ability to config how VAT applies to the price. I described VAT that is included in the price. You can configure VAT to be added to the price, so you would get paid more per sale.
The dashboard (not mine, found the most recent version's screenshot on the web): https://tech.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Paddle-Dashboard.png
They update it pretty often, so I recommend you to get through the review and get your access. It is definitely worth it!
My tool is SaaS with monthly/yearly subscriptions, https://pur.ninja