Paddle

Paddle is a merchant-of-record (MoR) platform built for software and digital-product businesses, combining payment processing, subscription billing, and global sales-tax compliance into a single service. Because Paddle acts as the legal reseller of a customer's products, it assumes responsibility for the entire order process — charging buyers, calculating and remitting VAT/GST/sales tax across jurisdictions, handling fraud liability, and managing chargebacks — rather than functioning solely as a payment gateway. This model is aimed at companies that want to sell internationally without standing up their own tax-registration, billing, and compliance infrastructure in each market.

The platform covers the recurring-revenue lifecycle: a hosted, localized checkout that supports 20+ currencies and multiple payment methods; flexible multi-product subscriptions with proration, seats, trials, discounts, and mid-cycle upgrades/downgrades; automated invoicing for B2B customers; and a customer self-service portal. Paddle's 2023 acquisition of ProfitWell added subscription analytics (ProfitWell Metrics) and churn-reduction tooling (Retain), which recovers failed payments through automated dunning and card-update flows. Developers integrate via REST APIs, a suite of webhooks, and Paddle.js for embedding checkout, with a sandbox environment for testing before going live.

For finance and operations teams, Paddle's relevance to an ERP or back-office stack centers on revenue and tax data: it produces consolidated reporting on payments, subscriptions, and remitted tax that can be reconciled into accounting and ERP systems. Integrations and data sync are handled through Paddle's API and webhooks rather than prebuilt ERP connectors, so connecting Paddle to systems like NetSuite, Sage, or QuickBooks typically involves custom development or middleware. Paddle is most commonly adopted by SaaS, AI, app, and game businesses ranging from early-stage startups to scaled software companies selling globally.