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Do not build this. Being the merchant of record is the product, and it is a legal position rather than software.

They sell your product on their own account. Sales tax and VAT registration, collection, remittance and filing in every jurisdiction are theirs, not yours, and so is the argument with a card network over a chargeback.

WHEN TO KEEP PAYING
- Software sold internationally, which is nearly all software
- Any volume where the alternative is registering for tax in a dozen countries and keeping up with the changes

WHEN TO BUILD
- Customers concentrated in one country where you are already registered
- Volume high enough that the percentage exceeds a tax service plus an accountant plus your own time

WHAT YOU TAKE ON, IN FULL
- **For digital services the rate is usually the buyer's.** Collect the country, apply the rate, and store two pieces of non-conflicting evidence of where they were. That evidence requirement is what people discover a year late
- Registration thresholds differ by country and several have none for digital services sold to consumers
- Invoices with the content and numbering each jurisdiction requires — gapless sequences allocated inside the issuing transaction are a legal matter in much of Europe, not a preference
- Refunds, chargebacks and disputes, where a chargeback costs the fee as well as the sale
- Subscription dunning: retry schedules that read the decline code, because retrying a hard decline is how a processor decides you are a risk
- Take advice before the first sale, not after the first tax year

IF YOU DO IT ANYWAY
- Hosted checkout, so no card data touches your server
- The order created from the verified webhook, never from the browser returning to a success page
- Idempotency by event id, out-of-order delivery handled, and a nightly reconciliation against the provider that alerts on any disagreement
- Access derived from an active subscription rather than a stored flag, checked on the server

DO THE ARITHMETIC
Add the percentage over a year against a payment provider's fees, a tax service, an accountant and your own hours. Write the number down. For most software businesses selling internationally the merchant of record wins comfortably, and knowing by how much is better than an opinion.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
You are buying tax liability, not a checkout. Price the alternative properly before calling it expensive.