In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Sudipto Manna and Lauren Steyn of FastSpring about their thoughts on how to approach payments and ecommerce in emerging markets, and some of the requirements needed to get access to local payment methods and currencies.

If you’re wondering how you’re going to get the most bang for your buck when it’s time for you to expand into new emerging markets, don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Watch or listen now!

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Podcast Full Interview: Video

The post EP44: Optimizing Ecommerce for Emerging Markets With Sudipto Manna and Lauren Steyn appeared first on FastSpring.

However, many founders quickly discover that the biggest hurdle to global growth isn’t product-market fit — it’s the structural drag of an entirely different set of Western administrative and regulatory requirements.

Companies are often caught off guard by the technical requirements and administrative realities. Moving into the West is not just about switching currencies; it’s a fundamental shift in how you manage your customer lifecycle and your business’s legal footprint.

Every new market demands its own web of legal entities, localized contracts, domestic banking, and tax registrations. That means that a lean, engineering-led startup can quickly become bogged down in legal and finance operations.

Based on FastSpring’s own internal data and our experience helping thousands of sellers scale, here are six proven strategies to navigate the high-stakes transition from APAC into Western markets.

FastSpring is how companies in APAC enter the western market online and in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

1. Leverage the Merchant of Record (MoR) Model

Selecting the right financial architecture is the most critical decision an APAC seller can make when selling beyond their home region. For many, the merchant of record (MoR) model provides a shortcut through the bureaucratic hurdles that typically accompany international growth. The MoR serves as the legal entity responsible for every transaction, allowing your team to focus on the product experience while the MoR handles the heavy lifting of global commerce.

• Immediate Market Entry: An MoR eliminates the need for APAC companies to establish local legal entities in the U.S. or Europe, enabling global expansion in days rather than months. Entity setup is not just a one-time cost — it creates ongoing legal, financial, and operational overhead.
• Compliance Outsourcing: The MoR handles the calculation, collection, and remittance of sales taxes and VAT, and it assumes the risk for fraud and chargebacks. And while taxes are very important, this is also critical  for companies using traditional PSPs, because it is just one part of a much bigger operational burden.

2. Meet Digital Goods Regulations in Europe

Europe has moved aggressively to standardize the digital economy, introducing frameworks that require absolute precision in data handling and tax reporting. Navigating these rules requires a proactive approach to ensure your checkout process remains both compliant and conversion-friendly. 

The following recent and ongoing mandates represent a hard line for international sellers, where universal requirements have replaced previous exemptions for smaller companies. 

• VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA): As of Jan. 1, 2025, previous VAT registration thresholds have been eliminated. Every B2C digital sale, no matter how small, is now a taxable event that must be reported through the One Stop Shop (OSS) system.
• The EU Data Act: Starting in September 2025, European customers have a “cancel anytime” right for cloud services, allowing them to terminate contracts with two months’ notice regardless of legacy terms. Providers must also ensure data portability, and by early 2027, all “switching fees” will be prohibited.
• Privacy as a Trust Factor: Beyond legal mandates such as GDPR, 2026 marks a shift toward “Privacy by Design.” Western buyers increasingly treat data transparency as a competitive requirement, so showing clear, auditable trails for data residency and automated decision-making is no longer just a legal hurdle but a primary driver of customer trust.

3. Navigate US Tax and Subscription Enforcement

The United States market is currently defined by complex state and federal regulations. Success in the U.S. requires a keen eye on shifting state legislation and a commitment to clear, accessible user terms that protect your business from regulatory scrutiny. 

Balancing these local tax obligations with federal consumer protection rules is essential for any APAC brand looking to establish a long-term presence.

• The Nexus Maze: Many U.S. states now impose sales tax on digital downloads and SaaS. For example, starting July 1, 2025, Maryland enacted a 3% sales tax specifically on technology services.
• Subscription Transparency: The FTC continues to aggressively enforce subscription transparency under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). Companies must offer simple, accessible cancellation options and clear disclosures about auto-renewal terms or risk significant penalties.
• Data Minimization: In line with the FTC’s focus on consumer protection, Western brands are shifting toward “data minimization”: the practice of only collecting what is strictly necessary. For APAC companies accustomed to data-rich “super-app” models, adopting a lean data approach is essential to avoid the multi-million-dollar settlements that are common under U.S. state privacy laws such as California’s CCPA.

4. Bridge the Gap Between Design and UX

APAC and Western customers often operate on different visual logic. While many high-growth Asian interfaces thrive on information density (such as surfacing multiple options, promotions, and data points all at once to show value), Western users typically favor minimalism and progressive disclosure. In the U.S. and EU, consumers don’t view a cluttered UI as feature-rich; instead, they perceive it as overwhelming and even spammy.

Here are a few tips on how to design for these audiences as you expand your business:

• Design for Focus, Not Completeness: Western SaaS buyers prioritize speed and ease. They expect a clean, minimalist layout with a single, clear call-to-action (CTA). In Western markets, whitespace is a functional tool for guiding the eye; removing it can lead to higher bounce rates.
• The Trust of Transparency: While APAC buyers often build trust through multi-sensory engagement, Western buyers build trust through visual clarity. This includes clear typography, a subdued color palette (moving away from high-energy reds and golds), and a direct, step-by-step onboarding flow that reveals features only as needed.
• Actionable Adjustment: Audit your marketing site and product dashboard for visual noise. Shift from a high-density, all-in-one layout to a streamlined experience that highlights one specific outcome at a time. This reduces the mental effort required for a Western buyer to say “yes” to your product.

5. Optimize Payment Performance and Risk

Cross-border payment performance is a silent variable that can either accelerate your growth or quietly drain your revenue through high decline rates. Friction at the point of purchase is often the result of poorly localized payment methods, or of inadequate fraud management that flags legitimate international buyers. 

For APAC companies, the most significant hurdle is often infrastructure: transitioning from a region where digital wallets and real-time payments are the primary engine of commerce to Western markets that remain deeply rooted in one-click payment systems.

• Local Optimization: Adding local payment methods (such as iDEAL in the Netherlands) can increase checkout conversion rates by up to 30%. Successful brands use dynamic checkouts that automatically detect a user’s location to display relevant currencies and billing frequencies.
• Managing Risk: Fraud and risk are harder to manage internationally. For example, while India’s UPI transactions are generally irreversible, Western credit cards offer robust consumer protections that make disputes easy. Utilizing an MoR can help mitigate this by assuming the legal and financial risk for fraud and chargebacks, protecting your bottom line from the volatility of international payment disputes.

6. Implement Advanced Pricing Strategies

Simply converting your home-market pricing into USD or EUR is rarely a winning strategy. To truly capture the market, APAC brands must adopt sophisticated pricing models that reflect the actual purchasing power and billing expectations of Western customers. These adjustments aren’t just cosmetic — they’re data-backed methods for increasing the lifetime value of every user you acquire.

• Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): Universal pricing often fails. SaaS companies that implement PPP-adjusted pricing — reflecting local economic conditions — see up to 18% higher growth rates and 25% higher revenue per customer.
• Annual vs. Monthly Billing: While monthly retention in Asia often hovers around 75% compared to 85%+ in the West, annual subscription retention is nearly identical globally. Understanding how customers like to buy (e.g., promoting annual plans) can help stabilize revenue and offset higher Western acquisition costs.

Scale Efficiently With FastSpring

Global expansion can get expensive quickly when each new market adds more internal complexity. FastSpring handles the global checkout, tax management, and regulatory compliance so you can focus on building your SaaS or software business rather than managing administrative overhead.

Ready to scale your SaaS beyond borders? Schedule a demo today.

The post 6 Proven Strategies for APAC Companies to Successfully Enter Western Markets appeared first on FastSpring.

Yet, there is conversation in the market that enterprise SaaS growth is beginning to slow. Finding new ways to grow can be especially hard for large companies that already have many subscribers, or which are chasing growth through new subscription services in addition to their usual offerings. 

The big question remains: How do you overcome the complex financial and technical hurdles of doing business globally? 

Spoiler alert: Global enterprise growth has an “easy button” with a merchant of record. Let’s take a look at how this powerful payment platform model solves enterprise-grade headaches.

FastSpring is how Enterprise game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Enterprise Global Expansion = High Stakes, Higher Friction

Enterprise leaders currently face three primary challenges that prevent them from capturing international market share:

1. High Investment and High Risk in Emerging Markets: You know the opportunity is massive, but the investment required to build local entities, hire tax experts, and establish banking relationships is astronomically high. While North America remains the largest market, Asia-Pacific is now the fastest-growing region globally, with a 24.6% CAGR in virtual fitness as an example. Effectively capturing new users in this space requires native options for buyers or local entities, but the risk of getting it wrong in a regulated market often stalls expansion plans before they begin.
2. The Architecture Gap: You need an enterprise-grade payment architecture that is resilient, localized, and compliant. However, correctly building all of that takes significant time, money, and specialized experience. Most organizations try to solve this with a domestic-only infrastructure, resulting in the “entity gap”: a state in which your regional web traffic is ready to buy, but sales can’t proceed because you don’t support local payment methods or don’t have local entities, leading to high cross-border decline rates.
3. The Need for Flexibility: You want the ability to adjust your rollout based on real-time data without incurring unexpected costs or risk. Traditionally, capturing 100% of market potential in regions such as India, Brazil, or Indonesia has required permanent local subsidiaries, which take years to establish. But you need the flexibility to test markets without being locked into analog-era banking setups that make it difficult to pivot.

These challenges can make it exceedingly complex or slow to expand into new global markets, even for well-established enterprise SaaS companies.

So What Is a Merchant of Record (MoR)?

Simply put, a merchant of record is a service provider that acts as your software’s reseller. While you maintain the brand experience and customer relationship, the MoR assumes the majority of the liability for the transaction.

The MoR model allows a company to “go live tomorrow.” Because the MoR already holds local entities and tax registrations across 200+ regions, you can leverage its infrastructure as your own. This is the strategic solution to the entity gap. For global enterprises, the barrier to international revenue is rarely a lack of demand — it’s the infrastructure.

Why Do Traditional Payment Providers Fail at Scale?

Most enterprises start with a standard payment service provider (PSP) such as Stripe, PayPal, or Square. However, as you expand into multiple regions (some with complex tax rules and regulations), the limitations of a PSP create a revenue ceiling:

• Missed Opportunities: It’s common for global leaders to see significant web traffic from regions like India or Mexico, only to find they can’t process a single transaction because they lack a local legal entity. One FastSpring customer was losing 20% of web traffic in India before implementing an MoR that accepted local payment methods, which are otherwise inaccessible without a local entity.
• Unnecessary Discounts: When internal infrastructure can’t support global growth, teams look for scrappy, alternative growth tactics that provide a quick revenue boost but which don’t maintain profit margins over the long term. A merchant of record provides a sustainable alternative to this by making it easy to unlock untapped revenue in new territories rather than slashing prices in existing markets.
• Administrative Burden: When your expansion plans reach your tax and legal departments, they’re often vetoed due to the complexity of managing local taxes and varying economic nexus laws (nexus is the defined threshold for tax liability on sales). 
• Tax Law Fragmentation: Beyond tax calculation, enterprises struggle with data fragmentation. A fragmented payment setup creates a reconciliation nightmare, where transaction data lives in silos. A robust MoR provides a single source of truth, ensuring that every transaction — regardless of currency or country — carries a consistent data schema that meets global KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) standards.

How to Scale With Speed and Flexibility

Every large company fears the need to “rip and replace” an existing infrastructure, even if that means sticking with a solution that’s not meeting their needs. Modern MoR solutions such as FastSpring address this through something called “headless deployment.” Let’s look at an example.

Avid, a leader in creative software, needed a global online payments solution that would leverage its recent investment in a new composable commerce stack. By implementing FastSpring as its MoR, they didn’t have to abandon their existing proprietary subscription engines or dunning logic. Instead:

• Avid managed the customer experience, subscriptions, and dunning.
• They layered FastSpring on top to manage the back-end: global payments, tax collection, and compliance.
• They went live in just three weeks and saw 4% of transactions come in through newly added payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which supports long-term retention through buyer-friendly payment methods. 

This headless approach is critical for organizations using middleware platforms for orchestration and entitlements. Instead of a brittle, hard-coded integration, an enterprise-grade MoR uses webhooks and robust APIs to push real-time transaction data into your data lake or BI tools (like Snowflake or Tableau). This enables real-time revenue recognition, a necessity for both public companies and those preparing for an exit.

That’s how you scale without friction.

Even Your Back-Office Team Will Rejoice

Internal tax and finance teams are often the strongest skeptics regarding global expansion. An MoR turns these skeptics into advocates by providing:

• Liability Offloading: The MoR is responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting all global taxes. If you get audited in Indonesia, the MoR handles it — not your internal team.
• One Report to Rule Them All: Instead of reconciling thousands of transactions across dozens of currencies and banks, your finance team receives a single, consolidated payment and a clean data set.
• ERP Integration: Leading MoR solutions such as FastSpring provide data that flows seamlessly into SAP Commerce, S/4HANA, and other enterprise backends, ensuring the cycles of planning, execution, and analysis are always data-driven and efficient.

This isn’t just about a CSV export — it’s about automated GL mapping. Leading MoR solutions allow you to map transaction types directly to your internal chart of accounts (COA). This turns a week-long, manual month-end close into an automated process, reducing human error and ensuring that your ERP sub-ledgers are always in sync with your actual cash flow.

Lessons From the Field: Navigating LATAM and APAC

Enterprise expansion often fails in these regions due to the infrastructure barrier. According to a Baymard study, businesses that enable regionally preferred payment methods see 21% higher growth rates than those that don’t.

Treating a Brazilian or Indian transaction as “cross-border” by routing it through a U.S. or EU bank is a recipe for involuntary churn. For a local bank, a foreign-processed transaction poses a security risk, leading to higher decline rates.

With an MoR as your local legal entity, the transaction stays “in-country.” This shift doesn’t just lower fees; it fundamentally stabilizes your leaky funnel by ensuring valid customers aren’t blocked by banking security flags.

Similarly, forcing a mobile-first economy into a credit-card-only checkout creates another barrier. While credit cards dominate the West, they are the exception in high-growth regions. 

In India for example, credit card penetration is under 5%, while UPI (Unified Payments Interface) accounts for over 75% of digital retail transactions. Similarly, in Brazil, Pix has surpassed 150 million users. It’s not necessarily about having more payment methods; it’s about having the right ones.

Bridging the Entity Gap for Global Growth

The transition from a domestic success story to a global enterprise powerhouse is no longer a matter of simply “turning on” new regions. For the modern SaaS leader, the merchant of record model is more than a compliance shortcut — it’s a strategic lever for revenue operations. It represents the end of the entity gap, allowing your organization to:

• Reclaim Lost Revenue: Stop losing 20% or more of your international traffic to avoidable cross-border declines.
• Decouple Growth from Headcount: Scale into 200+ countries without hiring a team of tax experts or managing dozens of local entities.
• Empower the Back Office: Transform your finance and tax departments by offloading the liability and complexity of global nexus and tax laws.

Global expansion in 2026 isn’t about being present in every market — it’s about being native to every market. By partnering with an MoR like FastSpring, you ensure that your infrastructure is as agile as your code.

The demand is there. The customers are ready. It’s time to close the gap.

You built the software. Let FastSpring build your global payments strategy.

FastSpring is how Enterprise companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software.

Ready to try FastSpring? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Headache-Free Global Growth: The Enterprise Guide to Merchant of Record appeared first on FastSpring.

Now, you’re looking outward. The goal is no longer just regional dominance; it is global expansion.

But selling software to a customer in Texas or Berlin is fundamentally different from selling to one in Rio. Many high-growth LATAM founders fall into the trap of thinking global expansion is just a matter of translating their website and adding a few currency options.

The reality is that once you cross borders, the rules of the game change completely. You’re suddenly exposed to a tangled web of tax liabilities, cross-border payment friction, and operational headaches that can stifle your growth before it truly begins.

Here are the four hidden barriers to global scaling — and how savvy founders overcome them.

1. The Tax Trap

A common misconception among international founders is that your company’s location determines your tax liability. You might think, “”I’m a Brazilian company, so I follow Brazilian tax laws.”

Unfortunately, in the world of digital product sales, tax obligations are almost always determined by where your customer sits, not where you sit.

Here are just a few common examples:

• The U.S. Nexus Maze: If you sell to buyers in the United States, you aren’t just dealing with “U.S. tax.” You’re dealing with economic nexus. Nexus is the legal status you reach when you cross a specific sales threshold. Once you sell more than that amount in a jurisdiction, you must start collecting its local taxes. With rules varying by state, county, and even city, you could find yourself owing taxes in 50+ different jurisdictions, each with its own rates and filing requirements.
• The VAT Burden: Similarly, if you sell into the European Union, you are responsible for collecting Value-Added Tax (VAT) at the buyer’s country’s rate (e.g., 19% in Germany vs. 20% in France) and remitting it to the local authorities.

For a growing finance team, international taxes can be an administrative nightmare. You’re forced to either hire expensive international tax firms or risk audits and fines that could cripple your business.

2. The Payments Paradox

When you expanded within LATAM, you learned that offering trusted local methods like Pix or Mercado Pago was critical to regional success. It’s tempting to apply the same logic globally by adding every possible payment option to your checkout page.

However, an overwhelming number of payment methods can actually backfire, creating decision fatigue or even confusion — which lowers conversion rates.

A customer in the Netherlands wants to see iDEAL. A customer in the U.S. expects credit cards or Apple Pay. If a German buyer lands on your checkout and sees a list of irrelevant options intended for Brazilian or American shoppers, trust erodes immediately.

You don’t need more payment methods; you need a dynamic checkout experience — a system that automatically detects a user’s location and device and displays only the currencies and payment methods relevant to them.

3. The Leaky Funnel

It’s natural to assume that a conversion occurs when a customer clicks “Buy.” In reality, cross-border sales face hidden obstacles that silently kill conversions and erode margins.

First, you face false declines caused by a lack of local acquiring.

• What Is Local Acquiring? It’s the ability to process a payment through a bank in the buyer’s own country. Without it, your transaction looks “foreign” to the buyer’s bank, triggering security flags and declining valid customers. This creates involuntary churn: Your product works, the customer wants to pay, but the banking infrastructure rejects them.

Second, you face value erosion.

• What Is Value Erosion? Even when payments succeed, standard payment service providers (PSPs) often apply high foreign exchange (FX) fees on every transaction. You might be making the sale, but you aren’t capturing the full value of the revenue.

4. The Finance Burden

Selling globally is exciting for the sales team, but without a unified platform, it creates a resource drain on your back office.

The core problem is fragmentation.

• What Is Fragmentation? If you sell in USD, EUR, GBP, and JPY using standard PSPs, your finance team is forced to reconcile multiple merchant accounts, inconsistent report formats, and varying settlement dates.

What should be a simple month-end close turns into weeks of spreadsheet wrangling to consolidate data. This operational debt scales with your growth — the more you sell, the harder it becomes to report on it.

The Solution: A Merchant of Record

The do-it-yourself approach to global sales — piecing together a PSP like Stripe with third-party tax tools and fraud plugins — often leads to a bloated total cost of ownership.

This is why high-growth SaaS companies partner with a merchant of record (MoR) like FastSpring.

When you sell through FastSpring, we become the legal seller of the product. This shift offers three critical advantages:

1. Immediate Tax Compliance: We handle the calculation, collection, and remittance of taxes in more than 240 countries worldwide, including all U.S. tax jurisdictions. You don’t need to register your business in Berlin or Texas; we are already there.
2. Higher Approval Rates: Because FastSpring processes payments locally in major regions, we see significantly higher authorization rates than standard PSPs. We also manage dunning behind the scenes to recover revenue that would otherwise be lost to churn.
3. One Wire, One Report: You can sell in 20+ currencies to maximize conversion, but FastSpring converts and remits a single, clean transfer to your bank account. We absorb the complexity so you can focus on your product and your business’ growth.

Go Global Without the Headaches: Partner With FastSpring

You’ve built a world-class product in LATAM. Don’t let the complexity of global bureaucracy slow you down.

By partnering with FastSpring, you gain a liability shield against tax risk and fraud, while delivering a seamless, localized experience to buyers anywhere in the world.

Ready to scale your SaaS beyond borders? Schedule a demo today and let us handle the complexity.

The post 4 Mistakes LATAM SaaS Companies Make When Selling Abroad — and How to Overcome Them appeared first on FastSpring.

• Stripe, 2Checkout, and FastSpring all offer differing levels of services, especially when it comes to managing tax calculation, collection, and remittance. 
• Stripe is a payment services provider (PSP), not a merchant of record (MoR). 2Checkout offers both PSP and MoR options. FastSpring is an MoR and always includes tax calculation, collection, and remittance with its services.
• Businesses that want more comprehensive tax management services for selling digital products should opt for a merchant of record like FastSpring.

If you’re currently using 2Checkout (now part of Verifone) or Stripe to sell digital goods but are considering switching — from one to the other, or to other options such as FastSpring — you may be wondering whether there are substantial differences between the platforms and their services.

In fact, there are some major differences when comparing 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring.

TL;DR: Stripe markets themselves as a payment services provider (PSP), 2Checkout is a payment service provider with an upgrade option to make them your merchant of record (MoR), and FastSpring is a comprehensive merchant of record from the outset.

What does all of that mean?

In this article, we’ll break down key differences between payment service providers and merchants of record, then we’ll explain what each of the above companies are and what main features they offer.

• Payment Service Providers vs. Merchants of Record: One Major Difference
• What Is Stripe and Who Is It For?
• What Is 2Checkout (by Verifone) and Who Is It For?
• What Is FastSpring and Who Is It For?
• Key Payment Processing Features of 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs FastSpring
• Key Platform Features of 2Checkout, Stripe, and FastSpring
• Handling Tax Calculation, Collection, and Remittance by 2Checkout, Stripe, and FastSpring
• Final Takeaways: 3 Different Levels of Service
• Partner With FastSpring, a Merchant of Record

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, and other digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Note: Information in this article was validated at time of publishing and is subject to change.

Payment Gateways, Payment Processing, PSPs, MoRs — What’s the Difference?

Step one of understanding the differences between 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring means clarifying a few helpful definitions:

• Payment services provider (PSP).
• Merchant of record (MoR).

Payment Services Provider

A payment services provider (PSP) is a platform that serves as a bridge between businesses wanting to sell a product, and the more specialized services and networks you need on the back end such as payment gateways, payment processors, and a merchant account. 

A PSP makes it easier for those businesses to sell their products online because the businesses don’t have to directly interface with payment gateways and payment processors — the businesses can just use the PSP, and the PSP will handle payment connections in the background. 

TL;DR: What’s happening behind the scenes is all pretty complicated.

• A payment gateway acts as a secure super highway to connect businesses to payment processors. It collects, encrypts, and transmits the sensitive information needed for a transaction.
• A payment processor is the piece on the back end that connects the payment gateway with the merchant’s account and card association networks. The issuing and acquiring banks can then authorize or deny the transaction request.
• A merchant account is a business-specific bank account that allows you to accept and process payments from credit and debit cards; it’s where the funds are held until the transaction is completed.

If all of that sounds really complicated to you, that’s because it is — which explains the appeal of a payment services provider that can handle all of that for you.

Merchant of Record

A merchant of record (MoR) includes the services of a payment services provider, but much more — it becomes the entity technically selling the product.

This means the MoR becomes the entity worrying about card brand rules, regulatory rules in many geographies, risk, and even taxes — which means you don’t have to. FastSpring’s experts will use the latest tools and techniques to manage risk, and we’ll even be responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting taxes.

Merchant of record and payment services provider platforms may each offer varying levels of additional features, such as integrations and API connections, subscription management functionality, customer support, and more. 

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: What Are They and Who Are They For?

What Is Stripe and Who Is It For?

Stripe is a payment services provider that focuses on payments, payouts, and managing business online.

The many products on Stripe’s menu are sometimes bundled and sometimes separate for an additional cost, which can get a little confusing as you click through various product pages. 

The core offering for payments is their Payments product, which includes the products Checkout, Payment Links, and Elements, but there are many features even within those products that are additional costs, such as additional payment methods, bank debits and transfers, point-of-sale (POS) Terminal, and post-payment invoices. 

Stripe pricing starts low per transaction, but it will add up quickly if you’re looking for a more robust service.

Is Stripe a merchant of record? 

No. Stripe as a PSP does not assume the same responsibilities an MoR does, such as managing risk, assisting with chargebacks, and handling taxes. When rules change in any jurisdiction where your customers live, you’re responsible for updating your checkout to comply.

Stripe does offer Radar, a product with two different levels of fraud and risk management tools, but if you want the advanced tools, it will cost extra per transaction.

Stripe also offers a Tax product that will calculate, collect, and report taxes in 90+ countries, and they can register in various countries for you — but the price goes up very quickly as you add additional countries, and there are limits on the number of tax filings and registrations per year as well as the number of transactions per month. 

Because Stripe is not a merchant of record, it can be used for selling physical goods, but its platform and services may not be as tailored to businesses that were built to sell only digital goods, software, SaaS, and similar.

What Is 2Checkout and Who Is It For?

2Checkout (now part of Verifone) bills themselves as a monetization platform for both digital goods and retail businesses. The pricing page at 2checkout.com shows that with their 2Sell base product, you can “sell any type of product.”

They offer three different levels of products: 2Sell for mobile and online payments worldwide, 2Subscribe to add on subscription management features, and 2Monetize to further add features such as global tax and regulatory compliance, invoice management, and more payment methods. 

They also have additional add-ons for renewal recovery, premium support, affiliate partnering for 2Monetize, complex subscription billing for 2Sell, and an enterprise pricing package called 4Enterprise.

Is 2Checkout a merchant of record?

2Checkout offers both a payment services provider model and a merchant of record model. While their 2Monetize page and MoR guide page do not reference each other, 2Monetize is apparently 2Checkout’s MoR product.

What Is FastSpring and Who Is It For?

FastSpring is a merchant of record that for over two decades has been serving B2B and B2C sellers of SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, AI, eLearning, and other digital goods. 

Our payments features help businesses go global instantly, but because we are inherently an MoR, we also help businesses increase profitability while mitigating risk — all while reducing your payments, sales tax, and subscription management tech stack down to one solution.

FastSpring offers global payments, multiple kinds of checkouts, subscription management tools for every stage of the subscription life cycle, fraud prevention, chargeback management, tax compliance, and more — all of which are included. 

We’re connected to multiple payment gateways (increasing payment authorization likelihood), and we’re laser focused on making it super easy to ensure you’re following all the rules — because our experts are responsible for risk and chargebacks. 

FastSpring’s pricing is a simple, single-package pricing model — not a base plan that requires lots of expensive add-ons. Our team will work with you to figure out a rate based on your transaction type and volume.

Note that there is no minimum transaction volume to use FastSpring, as we want to be the digital commerce partner that helps your business grow. 

For more pricing information, reach out to our team.

Is FastSpring a merchant of record?

Yes! FastSpring is a merchant of record, which means that we’ll handle payment services, but we’ll also become the party actually selling the product, so we’ll manage risk, chargebacks, and global VAT and taxes — so you don’t have to.

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Key Features

If you’re considering implementing a payment services provider or merchant of record for your business — or considering switching providers — there are many features you may need to know about before making a decision. 

Here are some important options to consider, with details on how 2Checkout, Stripe, and FastSpring handle each of them.

2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Payment Processing Features

Each provider’s basic payment capabilities include some combination of debit and credit card payments, alternative payment types, localized currencies, chargeback handling, fraud detection, and more to help ensure a successful sale. 

Stripe

Stripe accepts around 17 different cards, including global brands like Visa and Mastercard, Discover, Europe’s Cartes Bancaires, and Asia’s China Union Pay. They also take various bank debits such as ACH and SEPA, redirects, and transfers that connect directly to bank accounts, and they work with many popular wallet payment systems (such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal). To learn more, visit their documentation page on payment methods. 

Stripe supports processing charges in over 135 currencies. Currency conversions get a little complicated, so check out their documentation on currency conversions for all the details.

Additional fees are applied for currency conversion and cross-border transactions.

Chargeback protection and fraud protection are also available, both for additional fees per transaction. 

2Checkout

2Checkout accepts major worldwide credit and debit cards such as Visa and Mastercard, as well as various other regional cards across Europe, Asia, Brazil, and India. Various major digital wallets are also accepted, as are some online banking and direct debit payment options.

For offline payment methods, 2Checkout also facilitates wire/bank transfers, purchase orders, and a few region-specific options; visit the Verifone documentation page on payment methods for more details. 

On their documentation page for pricing localization, it details that pricing localization settings can be enabled to display different prices based on geolocation by IP address, but that this feature is only available to 2Checkout Enterprise Edition accounts. 2Checkout offers around 100 billing currencies.

Risk and fraud protection are included in all three packages, 2Sell, 2Subscribe, and 2Monetize. 2Checkout states that while banks handle chargebacks directly, 2Checkout is still involved in the resolution of the dispute, acting as a mediator between the bank/PayPal, the buyer, and you. 

FastSpring

FastSpring accepts many major worldwide credit cards and debit cards such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and UnionPay, as well as ACH direct debit and SEPA direct debit. Wire availability is available in select countries and currencies, as well as PayPal, Apple Pay, SOFORT, and various other popular payment options which are detailed on FastSpring’s documentation page for payment methods.

FastSpring enables its users to set up their stores to display currency localization in many different ways, based on what’s best for your business. FastSpring can make the conversion, or you can set a fixed price in each currency for each of your products; which currency is displayed based on location can be chosen by FastSpring, by you, or by the shopper. 

To remain a leader in fraud and risk support, FastSpring is partnered with global risk analysis and fraud prevention leader Sift to ensure secure payment transactions and PCI compliance, with increased accuracy in fraud decisions and better approval rates (and fewer false positives). 

And since FastSpring is a merchant of record, we’re responsible for keeping fraud rates and chargebacks under certain thresholds.

If you need support assistance with chargebacks, our Risk team can help, and the FastSpring platform also includes a Chargeback Overview Dashboard to help you keep track of chargeback rates, which products are most frequently involved, and a comprehensive log of the most recent chargebacks with filters to help you drill down for analysis.

2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Platform Features

Besides the online payment processing features and services that are core to PSPs and MoRs for online businesses, the platforms and how they integrate with your business (and website) can make or break how well they help your business move product and support a successful sale. 

Here are rundowns on checkout, payouts, integrations, APIs, reporting, and analytics for 2Checkout, Stripe, and FastSpring. 

Stripe

Stripe offers a hosted, brandable checkout for both one-time payments and recurring billing, which can be embedded on your own site, or you can pay a monthly fee to use their hosted checkout with a custom URL of your own. They have a tool to walk prospects through the customizations they offer so you can see what the checkout page might look like. 

Many factors go into how and when you can receive payouts from Stripe, especially dependent on your country, so be sure to check out their documentation page for more information. But if you’re in an eligible country, you may be able to receive daily payouts (although weekly, monthly, or manual schedule options may also be available).

Stripe’s multi-currency support for payouts appears to include the same currencies as their presentment currencies, meaning that if you can process payments in a currency with Stripe, you can receive a payout in that currency.

Stripe has a directory of partners that may offer easy integrations or connections to Stripe for ease of use, but they offer limited support in this area and refer users to the third parties for assistance when needed. They also have a REST API, with Payment objects used to facilitate payments, as well as SDKs. 

Some of Stripe’s financial reports are free, but for more advanced tools, you’ll need to upgrade your account and/or request beta access. For example, Advanced Revenue Reporting is still in beta, and their custom reporting offering using SQL, called Sigma, starts at $15 per month for up to 250 charges (plus 6¢ per additional charge).

Stripe offers some strong analytics tools, such as via their payment authentication report, but that requires their Sigma product.

2Checkout

2Checkout offers a few checkout types. Users can choose between one-step or multi-step popup experiences with their Inline cart, or users can choose the hosted checkout option that redirects shoppers to a 2Checkout page.

A third option for users of popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and Woocommerce is to integrate 2Checkout with that site’s native online shopping cart; a list of those sites can be found on their website.

2Checkout also offers a few integration connectors with popular CRMs like Salesforce and Adobe Analytics. Also available are an API and webhooks. 

By default, 2Checkout’s payouts occur on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis depending on the type of 2Checkout package you use, and minimums of 50 or 100 USD/EUR/GBP also apply. Those are the only three currencies in which 2Checkout will facilitate payouts.

2Checkout’s Business Intelligence, an engine for custom reporting and scheduled reports, is included in all three of their pricing packages, but advanced features like user log audits, subscription analysis, and financial reporting are not available in their base package of 2Sell. 

Analysis can be done using the reporting dashboard, and third-party analytics tools such as Google Analytics can be connected to your account for cart web analytics (on request for 2Sell and 2Subscribe users; included in 2Monetize).

FastSpring

FastSpring offers three types of checkouts:

• A Web Storefront hosted by FastSpring serves as the default option, allowing users to use product catalogs from their own websites or to utilize FastSpring’s platform to display products.
• A Popup Checkout utilizes your own website’s catalog and then provides a same-page experience by displaying the checkout window in front of your webpage. 
• Embedded Checkout keeps the checkout experience on your site without the need for redirects or popups. 

For payouts, most FastSpring sellers have a two per month frequency, but this can also be set to monthly. FastSpring can also change the minimum payment amount at your request. There are five currencies available for payouts — USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, and CAD — but there is a small currency conversion fee for payouts in currencies other than USD.

FastSpring’s dashboards enable users to dig into reporting around revenue, subscriptions, and even chargebacks. See transaction rates, net sales, refund rates, and more to assess maximum revenue impacts by each product. Understand critical subscription trends across regions, over time, and by individual products with built-in widgets for MRR, customer lifetime value, rate of churn, and more.

That data can be exported to CSV or JSON, or you can use FastSpring’s data API and webhooks to generate revenue and subscription reports to take your data wherever you need it.

FastSpring offers many tools that work in combination to empower your integrations: extensions, webhooks, APIs, and the FastSpring Store Builder Library (our JavaScript library). These are the tools and systems that help businesses get up and running quickly on FastSpring, so they can go global faster.

The developer-friendly, ready-to-deploy FastSpring Store Builder Library (SBL) enables you to pass sensitive information in an encrypted format — which is great for integrations — but it’s also great for setting up your store initially. This highly customizable JavaScript library helps quickly embed FastSpring ecommerce experiences into your website or application. 

Webhooks work with your backend or third-party systems for advanced integration and tracking events, and the FastSpring API lets you easily query your sales and subscription data via GraphQL or REST format on a programmatic basis.

Extensions such as MailChimp for emails, AdRoll for retargeting, and Google’s Analytics, AdWords, and Tag Manager make it easy to integrate FastSpring’s platform with other helpful business tools.

2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Calculating, Collecting, and Remitting Taxes

Tax calculation, collection, and remittance are very important actions a business needs to take to stay compliant wherever its product is being sold. 

Each payment services provider may handle different combinations of those functions, while a merchant of record should handle all of them. Knowing which pieces your provider takes care of for you (and if you’ll need to handle any yourself) is key to keeping your business compliant — and avoiding hefty tax fines. 

Stripe

By default, Stripe won’t calculate or collect taxes for you, and it won’t file or remit any of those taxes either. 

If you upgrade to the Stripe Tax product at the Basic level, it will automatically calculate and collect taxes for you, but there are per-transaction fees that vary based on the kind of integration you use.

If you upgrade to Stripe Tax Complete, they will manage obligation monitoring, registrations, calculations, collections, and filings, starting at $90 per month with a minimum one-year contract, and additional fees if the registrations and filings are outside of the U.S. — but that only includes two registrations per year, 200 transactions per month, 2,000 calculation API calls per month, and four filings per year. The slider-bar pricing tool on the Stripe Tax page suggests that per-month fee will get expensive quickly based on the number of registrations, transactions, API calls, and filings you need. 

Key takeaway: If you’re looking for a turnkey tax solution, Stripe probably isn’t what you want.

2Checkout

Since 2Checkout offers either a PSP or a MoR model, there are different levels of tax handling with each type. 

For businesses using their PSP packages (2Sell or 2Subscribe), there is a tax calculator that can be activated, but it is based on your tax data supplied to 2Checkout and comes with a disclaimer to that end. There appears to be a rather lengthy process to get the tax calculation feature set up and activated. 

For businesses using their 2Monetize package, global VAT and sales tax collection and handling are included, and 2Checkout handles VAT and compliance.

FastSpring

FastSpring is intrinsically a merchant of record, so tax calculation, collection, and remittance in over 200 regions around the world is always included for businesses using our services. 

You also won’t need to register for tax purposes in all of those regions, since FastSpring is the entity actually selling your product. Our tax experts stay up to date on global VAT, GST, and sales taxes so you don’t have to, and we file and pay $50M+ in taxes for our customers every year.

Final Takeaways: 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring

In summary, Stripe is an entry step into using a payment services provider, but it isn’t a merchant of record and won’t handle your taxes for you unless you upgrade with expensive add-ons. You can accept payments, but you’ll still have a lot of other business management to handle on your own or with additional partners besides Stripe. 

If you have a small business or startup, Stripe may be a serviceable option at first, but you could quickly outgrow it if you take your business global.

For starters, you’ll have dozens of jurisdictions to manage risk and taxes in, you’ll need to decide how to manage chargebacks, and you’ll need to set up subscription management tools and settings like dunning for rebilling, etc. — or you can watch the Stripe or third-party transaction fees stack up as you add on more products to cover as much of that as they can.

2Checkout offers either just PSP services or an upgrade to MoR services, but some platform features like pricing localization and certain reports are only available on a limited or upcharge basis. Their PSP-only services will calculate taxes for you, but that’s based entirely on tax data you supply to them, so you’ll still need to worry about those if you don’t upgrade to 2Monetize.

To compare, FastSpring handles both payments and taxes by offering one comprehensive MoR service. Choose between multiple checkout types with localized pricing, integrate with other important business tools, and stop worrying about global taxes as your business grows.

This makes FastSpring very user friendly for B2B and B2C SMBs selling SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, AI, eLearning, and other digital goods.

FAQs

Partner With FastSpring 

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help.

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for digital-first businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support.

If you think FastSpring could be the right payments and MoR solution for your business, reach out to our team or set up a free account.

Related reading: SaaS Companies: Four Signs You’ve Outgrown Stripe: Growth expert Fred Linfjärd (a former FastSpring user himself) explains the disadvantages of DIY-ing a payments solution with Stripe, and how FastSpring frees up dev resources to focus on your core product instead of payments and monetization.

This post was originally published in October 2023 and has been updated.

The post 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Comparing Payments, Taxes, and Platform Features (+ Pricing) appeared first on FastSpring.

This does not replace your responsibility to report income earned through FastSpring. You’re still responsible for meeting any local income reporting requirements in your country.

Under IRS regulations, FastSpring is required to report certain payment transactions to the IRS. As a result, FastSpring will issue Form 1099-K to U.S. sellers who meet the applicable IRS reporting thresholds.

Where Can I Find My Total Earnings?

To view your year-to-date gross sales:

• Go to FastSpring App Dashboard > Account Summary.
• Weekly Summary Reports, when totaled, show your Gross Sales for the calendar year.

Gross Sales are calculated as gross proceeds minus discounts, returns, and FastSpring fees. Taxes are excluded, where applicable.

For more detailed reporting, you can also use Payout Statements, which include orders, refunds, fees, chargebacks, and adjustments.

Where to Find Your Payout Statements

Payout statements are available in the FastSpring App Dashboard:

1. Go to Account Summary.
2. Select Payout History.

From there:

• Click a date range under Payout Cycle to view a specific payout.
• Select Generate Statements to create monthly or annual statements.
• Use the download icon to save or share statements.

These statements are commonly used for reconciliation and year-end tax preparation.

1099-K Reporting: What’s Current for 2025 Reporting Year

Under updated IRS guidance, Form 1099-K is generally issued to U.S. sellers only if both of the following thresholds are met:

• More than $20,000 in gross payments, and
• More than 200 transactions in a calendar year.

Receiving a 1099-K does not mean you owe additional tax. The form reports gross proceeds, not net taxable income. You are taxed on net income after refunds, fees, and allowable deductions.

For more information, please see our Tax information reporting: Form 1099-K page. 

Update Your Tax Information (W-8 / W-9)

All sellers are required to complete and maintain a valid Form W-9 (U.S. sellers) or Form W-8 (non-U.S. sellers) in the FastSpring dashboard.

Sellers must promptly review and update their tax information whenever there is a change that could affect tax reporting or withholding, including but not limited to:

• A change in legal entity name or classification.
• A change in tax residency or country of incorporation.
• A change in authorized signatory.
• A change in permanent address or business address.
• Any other change that impacts the accuracy of the information provided on the W-9 or W-8.

Failure to keep tax information current may result in incorrect tax reporting, backup withholding, or delays in payment processing.

To update your tax information:

1. Log in to the FastSpring App.
2. Go to Account Summary > Manage Tax Information.
3. Complete or update your W-8 or W-9.

If your tax details or mailing address change after a 1099-K is issued, contact
support@fastspring.com.

Quick Tips for a Smooth Year End

• Track earnings consistently using weekly summaries and payout statements.
• Understand gross vs. net income when reviewing 1099-K data.
• Keep records of refunds, fees, and expenses.
• Reach out early if you need help accessing reports or tax documents.

The post 2025 Year-End US Tax Reporting With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

In this episode, we sit down with Rachel Harding, Senior Director of Tax at FastSpring, to demystify the complex world of digital goods taxation. Rachel breaks down exactly what developers need to know about selling skins, battle passes, and currencies globally — without needing a finance degree.

Tune in to learn how to navigate the biggest compliance risks and keep your studio focused on what matters most: making great games.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Podcast Full Interview: Video

The post EP40: D2C Without a Tax Degree: How to Sell On a Web Shop Without Becoming a Tax Expert appeared first on FastSpring.

• Unlike payment service providers (PSP), which handle only the processing of payments, a merchant of record (MoR) handles the end-to-end payment flow and takes on full liability for the transaction.
• Partnering with an MoR simplifies the financial and legal operation — and the timeline — required for digital-first businesses to sell globally, by handling tax collection and remittance, regulatory compliance, checkout localization, and more.
• The MoR model is often more cost-effective than ad hoc payments solutions.

Digital-first companies can easily sell to customers around the world, right? So why not market your product globally?

Anyone who does business across borders can tell you: It’s not that simple. 

• Do you need to translate your website?
• Do you accept their country’s form of currency?
• Do you know local privacy and tax regulations?

We spoke to a software entrepreneur based in the Caribbean who was facing this issue.

Customers liked his products, and his company was growing rapidly. “But my country has less than a million people,” he told us. “If I really want to grow my business, I need to expand to other markets.”

He knew that selling his software in other countries would create a variety of tax, transaction processing, and compliance problems.

“That’s why I need a merchant of record,” he explained.

In this piece, we’ll explain what a merchant of record is — and why using one can make it much easier for digital-first companies to go global.

If you’re looking for a merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment and subscription platform for thousands of SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses, including VAT, GST, and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

What Is a Merchant of Record?

A merchant of record (MoR) is the legal entity that sells goods or services to a customer. Companies can be their own MoR, but you can also outsource this work to entities that sell goods or services on behalf of a business and, by doing so, take on the legal liabilities related to the transaction for you.

The merchant of record model helps you stop worrying about the regulatory and tax compliance issues involved with accepting payments from around the globe — so you can skip the hassle and focus on what you do best: building great products.

How Is a Merchant of Record Different From a Payment Service Provider?

A payment service provider (PSP) such as PayPal or iDeal is a platform that acts as a bridge, connecting sellers with back-end networks required for processing payments, such as payment gateways, payment processors, and merchant accounts.

You’re probably already working with one or two PSPs — whichever are most popular in your country or the country of your customers.

A PSP only handles the processing of payments, not anything else that goes into an order process, such as VAT (value-added tax), GST (goods and services tax), and sales taxes or payment disputes.

Some PSPs like Stripe accept multiple currencies — which is a big step towards being able to support customers from multiple countries, regions, or jurisdictions.

But various PSPs are popular in different places. And while PSPs are equipped to accept payments in different countries, they’re not responsible for helping you comply with tax requirements for each jurisdiction.

In comparison, a merchant of record handles all of that. The MoR becomes the seller of record (SoR) and, as such, the one to worry about differing rules across credit and debit card brands, regulations in each jurisdiction, consumption taxes, and general risk and liability.

Unlike with a PSP, when you partner with a merchant of record, it takes the lead on risk management, chargebacks, and global VAT, GST, and sales taxes for every transaction.

8 Reasons to Use a Merchant of Record

For many digital-first companies, taking the business global is a no-brainer. But doing so isn’t as simple as just deciding to. You need to think about:

• Navigating sales tax, VAT, and GST regulations.
• Figuring out how to accept multiple currencies.
• Understanding the nuances of regulatory compliance in various countries.
• Staying up to date on all of the above as regulations flux and evolve.

Solving for the above — and more — can add unnecessary complexity to your operations and slow down expansion plans.

That’s where a merchant of record can help your business grow more quickly, and with less liability, too.

1. A Merchant of Record Handles Sales Tax, VAT, and GST for Digital Goods

It’s one thing to ignore transaction-related taxes or kick the can down the road on figuring them out. But it’s a common mistake for companies to assume that sellers of digital goods aren’t required to collect or remit sales taxes, VAT, GST, and other consumption taxes for digital goods sold via online payments.

That just isn’t true. Sales of digital goods — including software, video games, mobile apps, etc. — often require the same consumption taxes as sales of physical products.

Ignoring that fact or putting off figuring it out could have disastrous consequences that reach well beyond just back taxes, ranging from exorbitant interest fees and penalties to multi-million dollar valuation adjustments.

A merchant of record is the ideal solution, allowing you to offload the complexity of sales, VAT, and GST tax collection and remittance. You can expand into new markets and regions quickly, all while avoiding the consequences of ignoring global tax laws altogether.

2. An MoR Covers Your Foundational Billing Tasks

Even before you add global selling into the mix, many software and SaaS companies struggle with foundational billing tasks, such as:

• Ensuring compliance with PCI-DSS standards for cardholder information, along with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Data Privacy Framework (DPF) requirements. (Visit our Trust Center here.)
• Decreasing payment failure rates.
• Managing and maintaining relationships with merchant banks, financial institutions, and payment processors.
• Negotiating payment processing fees.
• Handling payment disputes, refunds, and chargebacks.
• Calculating, filing, and remitting software sales tax, VAT, GST, and other consumption taxes.
• Risk analysis and fraud prevention.
• Reconciling transactions, payments, refunds, cash flow, and more.

Some of this work may be done for you by your accountant, subscription management platform, or payment processor, but they’re probably not doing everything — such as helping you decrease customer churn or issuing refunds.

Most likely (unless you’re already working with an MoR), you’re doing some of this work internally — or not at all.

All of the above is just one step. When you sell products to buyers in another country, things get even more complicated.

This kind of patchwork approach to billing tasks makes it easy for things to fall through the cracks — and it’s likely costlier than an all-in-one payments solution.

3. A Merchant of Record Calculates and Remits VAT, GST, and Sales Taxes for Digital Goods Based on the Buyer’s Location

When selling software or digital goods, VAT, GST, and sales tax are almost always calculated based on the location of your customer, not the location where you do business.

(This is different from professional services, which are often taxed based on where the service is performed, rather than the location of the buyer.)

For example, let’s say you sell software (or a digital product) and you choose a simple payment processor (such as Stripe or PayPal).

In that situation, if you have enough customers in Canada to meet the Canadian threshold for tax filing, then you must track, file, and remit taxes in Canada — regardless of your location or where your company is headquartered.

With a merchant of record, you’ll outsource the sales tax, GST/HST/QST, and many of the compliance responsibilities to your MoR — who will track, file, and remit taxes on your behalf, in Canada and in all the various countries where your customers live — instead of you doing that on your own.

(Did you know that, unlike the simpler VAT system that many countries and regions utilize, Canada actually has GST, HST, PST, QST, and even RST depending on the province? Canada applies several different tax types depending on the province or territory, so navigating compliance can get tricky quickly. If you didn’t already know that — and you don’t want to have to learn — a merchant of record might be what you need for your digital products business.)

If you multiply the above example by the number of countries where you have customers, you can see why so many digital-first companies choose the MoR model over simple payment processing when they expand globally.

With a merchant of record, you can grow your business much faster, with much less stress and hassle and much less cost from accountants and tax professionals.

4. A Merchant of Record Keeps Up With Ever-Changing Global Payment Rules for You

The specific requirements for doing business across borders vary from country to country, and they can vary further based on how much business you’re doing there, the structure of your business, and a variety of other factors.

Common steps for setting up successful cross-border business include, at a minimum:

• Learning the preferred local payment methods of a given region.
• Handling currency conversions when taking global payments.
• Understanding foreign tax requirements, including whether your offerings are subject to a value-added tax (VAT) or goods and services tax (GST).
• Detecting and handling fraud, which can be more prevalent on international payments.

That’s work you do per country, which means if you have a lot of customers in ten different countries, that’s ten sets of the above steps to figure out — a timely and costly process.

And this is the most important reason why it’s so helpful to use a merchant of record service when you’re ready to go global.

At FastSpring, we build and maintain relationships with tax law specialists around the globe, so we’re always up to date on laws and regulations if and when they evolve.

5. An MoR Simplifies Your Financial Operations

You didn’t start a software company to spend your days figuring out complex tax rules in countries all over the world. You started it because you had a great idea for a product, and you knew how to build it.

A merchant of record focuses on the selling, so you can get back to what you do best: making a great product.

The MoR acts as a reseller, buying the software from you, then reselling it to your customer. Instead of working directly with customers and myriad financial service providers, you communicate with just one entity — your MoR.

Your customers will still visit your website to buy software, games, in-game items, mobile app subscriptions, or other digital products — or to update their subscriptions — but when they’re ready to check out, they buy the products from the MoR.

They’ll receive a receipt from the MoR, and the MoR will be the company name listed on their bank account/bank statement or credit card statement. This is how the MoR becomes the liable party for the sale.

MoRs maintain robust ecommerce platforms to manage payment and tax processes — in addition to checkout localization and optimization.

At FastSpring, we also provide other services such as digital invoices and interactive quotes that are a part of our customer’s financial system.

6. A Merchant of Record Is Cost-Effective

If you’re paying a lawyer or accountant to figure out the tax obligations and business regulations of each country where your customers live, those costs add up fast. That’s before you even start localizing your payment platform, such as making sure your site accepts the preferred payment method of each country.

As an MoR, FastSpring already has an understanding of local taxes, payment gateways, and more. This makes it the most cost-efficient way to collect customer payments and remit taxes from a global customer base.

In summary, cobbling together a payment infrastructure that encompasses all the functions an MoR handles is a lot more costly and complex than dealing with one MoR partner.

7. A Merchant of Record Enables You to Go Global Immediately

Localizing pricing, currency, and your checkout flow for an optimal customer experience is a project that often takes years for companies that build those features on their own.

Since an MoR already has everything set up and ready to go, as soon as you become a customer of a global MoR, the currency, preferred payment options (from credit cards to digital wallets to global PSPs), and checkout experience can be customized for your customers right from the start.

8. A Merchant of Record Helps You Stay Compliant

Each country has its own sales and privacy regulations, and they’re always changing. This means you’ll need to keep a lawyer on retainer who’s familiar with the ever-changing global tax regulations if you’re handling compliance internally.

Once again, an MoR will do this work for you, avoiding costly fines and lawyer fees.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does It Mean to Be a Merchant of Record?

A merchant of record (MoR) is the legal entity that sells goods or services to a customer. Companies can be their own MoR, but you can also outsource this work to entities that sell goods or services on behalf of a business and, by doing so, take on the legal liabilities related to the transaction for you.

What Is the Difference Between a Merchant of Record and a Payment Service Provider?

A payment service provider (PSP) is a platform that acts as a bridge, connecting sellers with back-end networks required for processing payments, such as payment gateways, payment processors, and merchant accounts.

A PSP only handles the processing of payments, not anything else that goes into an order process, such as tax calculations and remittance, payment disputes, or regulatory compliance.

To compare, a merchant of record handles all of that. The MoR becomes the seller of record (SoR) and, as such, the one to worry about differing rules across credit and debit card brands, regulations in each jurisdiction, consumption taxes, and general risk and liability.

Your MoR, then, takes the lead on risk management, chargebacks, and global VAT, GST, and sales taxes for every transaction.

What Are the Benefits of Partnering With an MoR?

The most important benefits of partnering with an MoR include:

• Reducing the financial and legal burden on your company.
• Allowing you to expand globally immediately.
• Freeing you from having to calculate and remit taxes in every jurisdiction you sell to, and from having to stay up to date on ever-shifting regulations.
• Saving you money with a more cost-effective, all-in-one platform versus patchwork payment processing, subscription management, and accounting solutions.
• Improving your customer experience and boosting conversions thanks to features like advanced payment routing to mitigate payment failures, localized checkout, acceptance of preferred payment methods around the globe, consumer support, and more.

What Are the Key Responsibilities of an MoR?

Key responsibilities of an MoR include:

• Global online payment processing.
• Tax and regulatory compliance.
• Fraud prevention and risk management.
• Handling payment disputes, refunds, and chargebacks.
• Subscription management.

In summary, an MoR handles the end-to-end payment infrastructure, from localizing your checkout flow and processing payments to calculating and remitting consumption taxes like sales tax, VAT, GST, and more.

How FastSpring Can Help

FastSpring is the leading full-stack merchant of record service for growth-stage SaaS, software, video game, mobile app, and other digital products businesses. If you’re looking for a merchant of record to help your business expand globally, we’re here to help.

Our platform serves as an all-in-one payment and subscription platform that handles everything from payment and checkout localization; to sales, VAT, and GST tax management; to customer support for end consumers, and so much more.

Learn more about how FastSpring can help you grow your business globally: Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

This post was originally published in 2021 and has been updated.

The post What Is a Merchant of Record? (And Why Should You Care?) appeared first on FastSpring.

Or, you can simplify the system with one global merchant of record. 

When Excire became a popular enough product line that it was being sold in both Europe and the U.S., Managing Director Mathias Martinetz and CTO Thomas Käster knew their current online checkout setup — having one solution for Europe and one for the U.S. — was not efficient. 

“And we had a lot of manual work,” Mathias says. “Basically, each and every sale had to be manually organized and given to our tax advisor.”

And if they wanted to continue scaling their business and expanding into more countries, they needed a better system. 

That’s when they discovered the merchant of record model and, subsequently, FastSpring.

Completely switching online commerce systems can be daunting, especially when switching from one type (such as a very basic online checkout or web shop system) to another (such as a comprehensive merchant of record). But Mathias and Thomas did their due diligence, and they’re glad they found FastSpring.

Here’s what they did to ensure they’d find the right merchant of record (MoR) and have a successful transition.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Excire Needed a Simpler Payments and Taxes System

Excire is an award-winning line of photo and video management software products that help photographers organize, find, and cull their photos at lightning speed. With Excire Foto as a standalone product or with Excire Search as an Adobe Lightroom plugin, photographers can leverage meta data and AI for keyword search, facial recognition, grouping shots, image analysis, and more.

As the product line grew in popularity and the team was able to move from only selling Excire in Europe to selling it in the U.S., they found themselves with two separate shop systems. 

“As we were growing and wanted to grow more, we were looking for a solution that would allow us to have only one shop, but that could also be used around the world,” Mathias recalls. 

Thomas adds, “We encountered some technical challenges, which is to be expected when managing an ecommerce system independently. Additionally, we faced issues with our tax workflows, which were no longer sufficient to support the level of growth and scaling we had already achieved.”

They appreciated the value of offering localized currencies and payments to buyers, but as it was already unwieldy to have two online shops for two regions, they didn’t want to add more shops as they moved into new regions. They also knew they didn’t like managing all the sales taxes the way they had been, and that more growth would only make that even more difficult.

There had to be a better way, so they started looking around to see what other companies were using. 

Similar Software Companies Recommended FastSpring

Mathias and Thomas reached out to some contacts of theirs at another software company, and that company referred them to FastSpring. 

“The interesting thing for us is,” Thomas says, “if I see similar companies using FastSpring in the same way as we’d like to use it, that’s a good sign that FastSpring was the right decision for us.”

Without having to think for very long about it, they can easily list a handful of software companies in their industry who also use FastSpring, which makes them even more confident about their decision. 

Talk to Similar Businesses About THEIR Experiences

Besides just noting that many businesses like theirs were already using FastSpring, Mathias and Thomas recommend asking them for more information about what it’s actually like to use a particular payments platform or merchant of record. “Get their experience,” Mathias advises. 

Thomas adds, “In the end, you never know, right? When you decide to switch off an existing technical system completely and onto a completely new system, you never know if it will be the right decision.” So besides just observing what your own competitors are using, reach out to businesses you’re friendly with and “Talk a lot to the people.”

Pay Attention to the Responsiveness of Each MoR’s Team as You Begin Reaching Out

Excire was fortunate to have a very short list of possible ecommerce solutions, as FastSpring seemed like the clear winner just based on how many other companies were already using it. 

But if you have a few options on your list — or if you want to validate that the one you’re leaning toward is eager to meet your needs – you can learn a lot from how a possible vendor’s team responds to your initial inquiry. 

This may seem counterintuitive, as most people and organizations will be eager to ensure the first experience you have with them is excellent. And Thomas says that it’s not always easy to make a decision based on those first impressions. 

But he clarifies, “Even from a first impression, the FastSpring team does a better job than the competitors.” The Excire team had also approached an MoR company that had a team based in Germany, so Thomas and Mathias could speak with that team in their native language. 

“But the first contact with them was not as good as the first contact with FastSpring,” he continues. Besides the technical requirements he wanted to ensure were met, “The way the team took care was very important for the final decision to go with FastSpring.”

Define Your Needs Clearly and Communicate Them to Potential Vendors

Observing competitors, talking to similar businesses, and initiating contact with various vendors are all important parts of the external planning phase when evaluating a new ecommerce system, but there’s an important internal planning phase too. 

As Chief Technical Officer, Thomas is very hands on with the technical aspects of their various systems, so he knows how important it is to know what you need and communicate that to potential payments platforms. 

He explains it this way: “Summarize and describe your own necessities, or the aspects that are most important to you. Especially, what are the requirements of such an ecommerce system? When you explain it in the best way you can, then you’ll get the best, most concrete answer from the FastSpring team.”

There were several sessions back and forth between the Excire team and FastSpring as they worked through the technical details of what their team needed and how FastSpring could meet those needs. Thomas said those sessions helped them “come to the point where we were really sure about our decision to go with FastSpring.”

He continues, “I guess this is something every company needs to do on its own first: to check all the aspects that are important to them, and to communicate those aspects in a clear manner.” 

Besides wanting to combine their international payment systems into one simpler system that could continue expanding their global sales, Thomas and Mathias were also looking closely at competitive pricing, payment failure systems, ease of international pricing management, newsletter systems, subscription capabilities, and integrations. 

The Excire team also found FastSpring’s pricing better than the other merchants of record they evaluated.

Upgrade to a Merchant of Record Like FastSpring

It was looking at and talking to companies similar to Excire that tipped off Mathias and Thomas to the merchant of record model as the answer to their global payments and taxes question.

“That’s how we found out that the solution could be a merchant of record,” Mathias says. “So that’s how we got more into it and found out that there is an advantage: that all tax and currency related activities can be handled much, much easier than if we would do it on our own.”

Switching from separate systems for different regions to one global solution would be an upgrade, but finding an ecommerce model that also managed sales taxes and VAT for Excire sales would provide an even greater improvement to their operations.

FastSpring has also made many of the smaller, day-to-day management tasks easier. For example, Mathias says that “We can easily define prices worldwide; that’s quite smooth. And it was helpful to implement a subscription model, right, Thomas?” 

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Thomas adds.

When Excire initially launched on FastSpring in 2023, they ran into some challenges with email and analytics integrations. The FastSpring team worked hard to meet Mathias’ and Thomas’ needs, prioritizing additional help for the Excire store integrations and finding ways to meet their needs.

Thomas says of their more recent subscription launch, “This kind of integration was very easy.” He says that their integration requirements may be more complicated to fulfill than some companies’, but that the communication between FastSpring and their licensing vendor has been “really easy and robust.”

Partner With FastSpring to Simplify Your International Software Sales

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? 

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, gaming, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. 

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post How Excire Simplified Their International Software Sales (and Taxes) With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

When we ask our customers, “Why did you choose a merchant of record (MoR) over a traditional PSP?,” one of the most common responses is the ease of tax compliance — the ability to “set it and forget it.”

But tax is far from a static topic. In fact, it shapes economies and influences global commerce. That’s why we continuously monitor tax regulations worldwide — tracking threshold changes, new legislation, and tax rate adjustments — so that our platform remains compliant and seamlessly supports your business.

One of the key areas of tax compliance we manage is VAT (value-added tax) on sales of digital services. Many countries issue separate guidance to regulate the supply of digital goods and services, when provided by a foreign company. (Sometimes this is referred to as ESS, or electronically supplied services regulations.) And the tax treatment can differ from rules followed by a resident company. It’s important to understand the nuances to remain tax compliant. 

These regulations often broaden the scope of transactions subject to VAT and can include services such as:

• Streaming platforms (e.g., Netflix, Spotify).
• Online advertising (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads).
• Cloud computing services.
• eLearning platforms.
• Software and app subscriptions.

Other requirements can include engaging a local representative to act on your behalf, triggering income tax nexus (in addition to VAT nexus) and may even require you to settle any outstanding balances prior registration. But each country has a unique approach to global tax compliance.

Upcoming Regulations

On January 17, 2025, the Philippines extended its VAT legislation to cover digital services supplied by foreign companies to consumers in the Philippines. They’ve issued several interim deadlines, but the important date is June 1, 2025. Companies should register and be ready to collect 12% VAT at the very latest by June 1, 2025.

We’ll be ready — will you?

Want a Payments Platform That Will Worry About Taxes for You?

You can stay up to date by reading complex tax regulations — or you can partner with FastSpring. As your global commerce partner, we stay ahead of these changes so you can focus on growing your business without tax-related worries. 

For more details on tax compliance with FastSpring, visit our tax documentation or reach out to FastSpring Support.

About FastSpring

FastSpring is how SaaS, software, digital products, and video game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software.

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post The Nuances of VAT on Digital Services Sold Internationally appeared first on FastSpring.

However, taking advantage of this shift means that you become responsible for everything that comes with selling games in whatever jurisdictions you sell them in — including setting up an online store and displaying products, having a way to accept and process payments, and especially, taxes. 

In this article, we focus on how selling mobile apps and games D2C via web shops can affect your indirect taxes (sales tax and VAT) and what developers need to consider as they start diversifying game monetization.

Whether you want to start big or start small with the D2C model, it’s important for developers and publishers to understand the sales tax and VAT implications of selling D2C via web shops.

Payments Options for Selling Games D2C

When game companies decide to sell D2C, they typically choose between two key service models: using a merchant of record (MOR) model, or by leveraging a payment service provider (PSP). Each model comes with distinct tax responsibilities.

Merchants of Record

A merchant of record is a comprehensive payments and taxes service that becomes the legal entity selling the product. That means the MoR becomes responsible for worrying about the regulatory and sales tax and VAT implications of accepting payments from any of the countries where it sells the product — instead of the software maker or game publisher.

Payment Services Providers

A payment services provider can help businesses sell a product, but it only bridges the gap between the seller and the specialized payments services and networks needed to accept payments, such as payment gateways, payment processors, and a merchant account. 

So a PSP simplifies the process of accepting payments, but that’s usually all it does. A PSP will not worry about international taxes and regulations (some PSPs may have add-on services to help with taxes, but those costs can pile up as the package of services becomes more complex). 

The Tax Implications of Selling D2C With a PSP or MoR

Payment Service Providers and Taxes: Missing Pieces

A PSP facilitates payment processing but leaves most sales tax and VAT related duties to the game publisher.

Here are a few of the tax responsibilities that PSPs won’t take care of:

• Tax Registration: Registering in U.S. states or international countries where the developer has sales tax and VAT nexus.
• Tax Calculation and Collection: Ensuring that sales tax and VAT is calculated, collected, and remitted accurately.
• Liability Management: Bearing full responsibility for sales tax and VAT related issues, including audits.
• Compliance and Audit Costs: Covering the expenses of in-house or outsourced sales tax and VAT compliance services and audit related fees. 
• Invoice Disclosures: Providing correct sales tax and VAT disclosures on invoices.
• E-Invoicing: Issuing e-invoices in countries requiring them.
• Legal Representation: Appointing legal representatives where required.

Merchants of Records and Taxes: Handled for You

An MoR assumes full responsibility of sales tax and VAT compliance because it’s the entity actually selling the product, allowing developers to focus on what matters: game development.

The many benefits of using an MOR include:

• The MoR takes care of all the bulleted points above that a PSP won’t.
• Reduced Legal Exposure: Developers are shielded from direct interactions with tax authorities.
  • For example, when one of our customers faced aggressive sales tax and VAT inquiries, FastSpring’s tax team intervened, providing expert representation and achieving a favorable resolution (read more here). Without the kind of tax support an MoR provides, a regular inquiry could lead to a full audit if these taxes are handled in house.
• Expert Tax Support: A dedicated tax team ensures developers stay compliant and can resolve disputes with sales tax and VAT authorities effectively.

Why Choose FastSpring as Your MOR? 

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. 

To further invest in our commitment to supporting game developers, FastSpring hired Chip Thurston as our Head of Gaming. Read the press release here. 

FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Choose A Partner You Can Trust With Your Players™ and spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

Ready to get started? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post The Tax Implications of Selling Games D2C via Your Own Web Shop appeared first on FastSpring.

However, navigating these expansion journeys requires strategic planning, local market knowledge, and the right technology infrastructure.

In this guide, we explore five proven strategies that successful LATAM companies have used to establish their presence in Western EU and U.S. markets, with practical insights on overcoming common challenges.

FastSpring is how SaaS, software, digital products, and video game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself. 

5 Ways LATAM Companies Can Accelerate Their Growth in US and EU Markets

1. Localize Your Payment Infrastructure

One of the most critical factors for successful market entry is adapting your payment infrastructure to meet local expectations and requirements.

Why it matters: Payment preferences vary significantly across regions. While cards dominate in the U.S. (with credit and debit cards accounting for a total of 62% of all payments), European consumers often prefer local payment methods like iDEAL in the Netherlands or Klarna in Sweden.

Success strategy: 

Implement a flexible payment platform (such as a merchant of record) that supports:

• Multiple currencies with dynamic pricing.
• Region-specific payment methods.
• Local tax compliance automation.
• Subscription management across different regulations.

2. Adapt Your Go-to-Market Strategy for Each Region

The marketing and sales approaches that work in LATAM markets often need significant adjustment for Western markets.

Why it matters: Business cultures, buying processes, and customer expectations differ substantially between regions. U.S. businesses typically have faster decision cycles but demand more comprehensive support, while EU organizations often have longer, more committee-driven purchasing processes.

Success strategy:

• Develop region-specific value propositions.
• Adjust pricing strategies based on local market conditions.
• Create localized content marketing strategies.
• Build region-appropriate sales cycles.

3. Navigate Complex Regulatory Landscapes

Companies often face significant regulatory hurdles when expanding to EU and U.S. markets.

Why it matters: Western European markets operate under GDPR, while different U.S. states have varying data protection laws. Additionally, each region has specific requirements regarding financial transactions, business registration, and consumer rights.

Success strategy:

• Implement comprehensive subscription management systems with built-in compliance.
• Automate tax collection and reporting.
• Develop clear data handling policies that meet different regional requirements.
• Partner with experts who understand multi-regional compliance.

4. Build Strategic Partnerships in Target Markets

Successful LATAM companies rarely enter Western markets alone — they leverage strategic partnerships.

Why it matters: Local partners provide invaluable market knowledge, established distribution channels, and credibility in new markets where your brand may be unknown.

Success strategy:

• Identify complementary businesses in target markets.
• Create joint offerings that leverage each company’s strengths.
• Establish integration partnerships with popular local platforms.
• Consider channel sales models where appropriate.

5. Implement Scalable Subscription and Pricing Models

The subscription economy has revolutionized how software and digital services are sold globally, but requirements vary significantly by region.

Why it matters: Different markets have varying tolerance for pricing levels, subscription terms, and billing frequencies. Additionally, managing subscriptions across multiple currencies and tax jurisdictions presents significant operational challenges.

Success strategy:

• Create flexible subscription management systems.
• Implement smart dunning processes to reduce voluntary and involuntary churn.
• Automate currency conversion and regional pricing.
• Build analytics dashboards to track performance by region.
• Design subscription models that align with regional expectations.

The Technology Foundation for Global Expansion

At the core of successful international expansion lies the right technology infrastructure. Many LATAM companies falter not because their product isn’t competitive, but because their backend systems can’t handle the complexities of multi-regional operations.

Key technology requirements include:

• Supporting regional payment methods.
• Multi-currency support with automatic exchange rate updates.
• Global tax calculation and compliance automation.
• Localized checkout experiences.
• Subscription management across different regulatory environments.
• Fraud prevention adapted to regional risk profiles.

Ready to Take Your LATAM Business Global?

Expanding from Latin America into Western European and U.S. markets represents a tremendous growth opportunity, but it requires careful planning and the right infrastructure. The most successful companies recognize that payment processing, subscription management, and compliance aren’t just operational details — they’re strategic advantages when implemented correctly.

FastSpring’s all-in-one merchant of record platform is designed specifically to help companies like yours navigate international expansion with confidence. Our platform handles the complexities of global payments, subscription management, tax compliance, and fraud prevention, allowing you to focus on what you do best: building great products and services.

Talk with a FastSpring expert today to create your customized global expansion strategy and learn how our platform can accelerate your growth in Western European and U.S. markets.

FastSpring is how SaaS, software, digital products, and video game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself. 

The post 5 Proven Strategies for LATAM Companies to Successfully Enter Western EU and US Markets appeared first on FastSpring.