merchant-of-record
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The Shop Behind the Shop: World Pantry’s Quiet Food Empire
A chocolate bar in an Arizona summer is a logistics problem disguised as a snack. For food brands, World Pantry sells the solution - and often runs the entire online shop around it.
Sanlo Built a Door Around the Tollbooth
Game studios once came to Sanlo for money. Now they also come for a way around the app-store tollbooth - a small shift in plumbing that can rearrange the economics of a hit game.
Paddle puts a price on the paperwork: 5% + 50¢
Selling software worldwide is easy until the money arrives. Paddle takes a cut to handle the checkout, subscriptions and sales-tax obligations - a bargain whose value depends on what you would otherwise have to build.
Digistore24 Built a $3 Billion Checkout by Doing the Work Creators Hate
The German-born platform bundles payments, tax, refunds, affiliate payouts and funnel tools into one transaction fee. For online sellers, the promise is simple: give up a slice of every sale to get your back office - and a distribution network - in return.
The Checkout Company Trying to Give Game Makers Their Store Back
Apple, Google and Steam made game distribution easy - and expensive. Xsolla built a 20-year business around the awkward alternative: helping studios sell directly, get paid locally and keep the player relationship.
FastSpring Sells the Software So Its Makers Don’t Have To
A checkout is the visible inch of a global sale. FastSpring takes responsibility for the tax filings, payment routes, subscription logic and buyer support underneath it - becoming the seller on paper so digital companies can keep building.
Trustap
Trustap is an Irish fintech that provides escrow-style, milestone-based payment infrastructure for online marketplaces, ecommerce platforms and individuals. Acting as the merchant of record, it holds a buyer's funds until goods or services are confirmed as delivered, then releases them to the seller - reducing fraud, chargebacks and disputes for high-value and peer-to-peer transactions. Founded in Cork in 2017 by Conor Lyden after he was scammed buying football tickets, the company now works with 250+ partners across roughly 27 countries and is building Trustap Index, a product that makes marketplace listings machine-readable and transactable by AI shopping agents.
ZeroSettle
ZeroSettle is a drop-in SDK that lets mobile app developers skip Apple's 30% cut on in-app purchases by switching users to direct billing - charging just 5% + $0.50 per transaction instead. Built by two former Apple software engineers and backed by Y Combinator (W26), ZeroSettle arrived at the exact moment the Epic v. Apple ruling cracked open a $150B+ market. Setup takes 15 minutes, and developers get instant Stripe payouts, built-in tax compliance across 190+ countries, and smart conversion flows to migrate existing subscribers - all without touching App Store rules.