Merchant of
Record at Work

When growth crosses borders

A SaaS company can pick up its first subscriber in Brazil without ever deciding to enter the market. A game can build a following in Indonesia before the studio has worked out what selling there directly would involve. Not a bad problem to have, but still a problem to solve.

For digital businesses, customers can arrive before the market-entry plan does. Sometimes demand comes first. Then comes the practical question: how much should a business build before it knows how big that market will become?

Local doesn’t stop at checkout

We’ve spent a lot of this journey looking at what happens when someone reaches checkout. Getting the payment mix right matters, but how people pay is only one part of selling in a market.

Someone also has to make the sale, register in the country tax agency and work out which taxes apply, issue the right invoice or receipt, handle refunds and chargebacks, and follow the rules of the market where the transaction happens.

And, just like payment habits, those rules change across borders, so once a business knows how local customers want to pay, there’s another question, what actually needs to be in place to sell to them?

The other side of checkout

There’s more going on behind a sale than the customer sees.

Some parts of that stack get complicated quickly, and tax is a good example. The same digital product can face different tax rates, registration requirements and invoicing rules from one country to the next.

Payments come with local rules too. In Egypt, for example, card payments must be processed locally by a local entity. For a digital business selling across ten markets, the product can stay exactly the same while the rules around selling it change ten times.

A global business can build this itself, use different partners for different parts, or work with a Merchant of Record to take on the legal sale.

SaaS can start picking up customers in a country long before anyone has called it a new market. Someone finds the product, subscribes and suddenly there’s revenue coming from somewhere new.

But subscriptions have to keep working. Payment methods, currencies, tax, invoicing and local rules come back with every renewal.

Gaming shows another side of local payments. The right payment method can help a game find new players, not just help existing ones pay.