What are the gotchas from those using Paddle?
Hi, I'm starting looking around on how to charge for a product I'm building on the side, and Paddle so far seems the best option as it'd take care of taxes without having to integrate with other providers (Avalara, Quaderno, or others).
I've been digging into their documentation and so far it seems good enough (I still consider Stripe 1000 years in the future, but whatever). I'm also planning on using their inline checkout, which is not that customizable, but I prefer that to their modal. Has anyone integrate them this way? What have you found that you cannot do or is hard to do with Paddle?
In my case, today I added a super simple way for my users to change their email (the same way it is on practically every existing website with an account system) and I wanted to update the email on Paddle's system as well in order to keep it updated and have my customers receiving the invoices/receipts to the current email address. Guess what? Apparently it's not possible to update an email on Paddle from the API, their suggestion is to send to yourself (ie. developer) an email when that happens, and then go into their dashboard and change it from there. The explanation for this is that it seems too difficult to add and it'd require a complete change on the structure of the database, so it's also not in plan for the near future.
This is my big gotcha, nothing super blocking, but still a big surprise and really unexpected in 2020. What are the other things you've found and that someone should be aware of (before spending time integrating)?
The other gotcha I forgot to add is that they don't have any sandbox environment, so if you want to test the real flow, their suggestion is to create a 100% discount coupon and go through the flow, or otherwise make the real payment and then refund it to yourself. Not the best approach, but still at least refunds are free (from what I've read).
We have 2 accounts, one for test environment and one for production. They are aware of this since I mentioned it during registration to the sales person that contacted me. They don't seem to mind, which is good.
Since you end up testing production environment too, you end up using the 100 percent discount coupon, or refunding yourself anyway. Both work fine from experience.
Only catch is using a non recurring discount coupon while subscribing to a recurring subscription..charged myself already this way.
I solve this with modifiers: subscribe with coupon, then put a modifier on the subscription to subtract 1k.
Paddle has been improving developer documentation and apis lately, happy about them.