Alternatives to ShareIt/MyCommerce/Digital River

[hugoderwolf]

Stripe (afaik) has a tax tracking feature so you can charge correct taxes for every country and track all the info needed. Nevertheless, you are still responsible for filing taxes everywhere you need to (typically there are thresholds so it takes a while until you really have to, but nevertheless, that headache is yours or your accountant's).

Since you're EU-based I think I'd recommend Paddle over FastSpring, that saves you the USD payout trouble. Also worth a look is Moonbase.sh, which are fairly new, but I like them a lot. They're an MoR payment/shop platform combined with a licensing backend and they understand the plugin industry.

Regarding website integration: with all these services, you don't necessarily need to integrate with the API or something. That's only needed for custom webshop implementations. In the simplest way, all you need to do is load a JS library and copy the HTML for a button that opens their popup checkout thingy.

[sascha]

Thanks you both, well appreciated! I personally try PayPal first everywhere I shop but of course I can't speak for others. Interesting to see it's still used a lot.

I've briefly heard about moonbase a while back (maybe it was on the JUCE forum), but didn't realize the potential at first. Their pricing model looks reasonable for what they offer as MoR, and the licensing part is worth a closer look. Has anyone here worked with their JUCE module yet? Is it anywhere 'in action'?

[TobbenTM]

Hey all, I'm Tobias and the creator of Moonbase.
Sorry for jumping in here as a commercial party, please let me know if I'm overstepping.
Happy to answer any questions you might have about our platform, secure licensing, handling taxes and payments and anything in between!

Regarding @sascha's question about our JUCE module, you can see it working in action with some of our merchants like Black Salt Audio or NextMidi, both offer trials so you can try out any of their plugins and experience what the general flow feels like.
Both of these are using our SDKs to build fully custom storefronts, but we have alternatives for easier integrations too.
I've been getting some really good feedback on the integration part of our module, one merchant said he was up and running within the hour with all of his existing plugins! We also have some open source sample implementations that should give a brief impression.

I have built several stores earlier using miscellaneous competitors, like others have said in the thread, if you don't pick our platform, Paddle is a strong contender for payments of single products, Fastspring better for more but a pain to deal with when having more complex requirements. Stripe Tax doesn't actually help you dealing with VAT, you really want a MoR. I built Moonbase to join licensing and payments, and the closest you'll get to this might be LemonSqueezy, but I've never personally tried them. Polar.sh also recently launched licensing, and they act as an MoR, but it's also very new.

[sascha]

In Norway. The 'AS' as the legal title rang a bell here. Which is perfect for us EU citizens.

Ah, yes, Tobias, thanks for chiming in. I'll check things out next week, looking forward to that.

[TobbenTM]

I’ll make sure to make that more clear on our website, but we’re located in Norway.
That’s another reason why I built Moonbase, we really needed some European competitors to the incumbents.
This means that GDPR concerns are obviously all handled, no data leaves the EU, and critically we offer handling of both EUR and USD. This is configurable on your Moonbase account, so we usually see US merchants only selling in USD, while our European merchants usually do a combination. We perform no conversion on our end so that we can forward revenue with the least amount of fees possible.

[quikquak]

AFAIK Fastsping is a good and quick way to go, and if you use Wise, you'll get very good conversion rates (Fastspring pays Wise in USD, Wise pays you in EUR for a pretty minimal conversion fee)

When I queried Fastspring Support about using Wise, they emailed me saying

"Unfortunately we don't, we only use Hyperwallet." I don't know if he meant just the UK, or in general.

[ilmai]

This is relevant to my interests as well, as I'm about to start selling my first product in the coming months. Previously I had more or less settled on Paddle. I was considering Cleverbridge as well but they never replied to my inquiries, not a good sign. Moonbase looks great and it's great that it's located in the EU, so I think I'll have to choose between them and Paddle. Licensing integration also sounds good but as I'm working in Rust and not JUCE or .NET, it's not an option for me. I would need a Rust or C API.

[Urs]

We went with Cleverbridge, our checkout has just gone online with them.

[StevenOBrien]

Just a note about FastSpring: I had been using their checkout to sell royalty free music licenses on my website for about two years, and they... sprung... a surprise $150 fee on me in December 2023, citing the need to complete a "risk screening process". This was apparently sent out to all sellers who were selling below a certain volume.

They abruptly changed their ToS to do this, and made no mention of it in their pricing prior to this.

I am developing a plugin which I hope to bring to market in the coming years, and had originally planned to use FastSpring for this. It's not that a $150 one-off fee is particularly onerous or anything, especially if you're generating a lot of revenue through them, but any company which feels justified in changing their ToS and springing surprise fees/changes on you is not one I am comfortable with having as a single-point-of-failure in a business. It just leaves you wondering what else they might unexpectedly do in the future.

That said, my experience with them apart from that was great. Support was good and the checkout was extremely easy to implement.

[Tone2 Synthesizers]

We went with Cleverbridge, our checkout has just gone online with them.

Hi Urs,

How is your expereince with Cleverbridge so far?

Markus

[Ilmar]

About MyCommerce

Have you received any payouts after they changed their payout policy ?

My last payout was 15th July (for June sales) and now they are holding my July August September payments and cannot tell the date when they are going to process the payouts. Also August sales report not available.

Meanwhile I switched to FastSpring

[Urs]

No payments yet.

@Markus: We've got one week of sales with Cleverbridge and so far no issues. It's too early to say if their checkout, fraud prevention etc. make any significant difference on sales. Some features are definitely better than MyCommerce.

[Tone2 Synthesizers]

Thank you

[quikquak]

@Tone2 You mentioned early that it's to do with them starting to pay out a month later.
So they invest our cash for two months before giving it to us.
*edited* - got it wrong, long day.

[AndrejK]

Guys. Thank you for this thread.

Same here. Been a customer for 24 years. Last payout in July 2024, nothing since. They're sending forms to fill, but nobody is answering questions. Support for us vendors doesn't exist.

Has anyone migrated subscriptions to another vendor? Anyone knows the steps how to do it?