Contents
What Paddle Does and What PaddleSubs Does
Paddle is a merchant of record: it sells your products to your customers on your behalf. Paddle takes the payment, charges and pays the right sales tax or VAT for the customer's country, sends the receipt and invoice, retries failed renewals, handles refunds and chargebacks, and pays you what is left after its fee. Your customers' card details never reach your site.
PaddleSubs does everything on your site's side:
| Paddle | PaddleSubs on your site |
|---|---|
| Keeps your products, prices and discounts, with their names, descriptions and amounts. | Lets you create and edit them from Joomla, and adds what Paddle has no place for: a Joomla category, a level, an access level, user groups and how long a one-time purchase lasts. |
| Shows the checkout, takes the payment and works out the tax. | Shows your products and prices, and opens Paddle's checkout when a visitor clicks . |
| Tells your site about every payment, renewal, refund and change, by sending a webhook. | Receives the webhooks, matches the customer to a Joomla account (creating one when needed), records the purchase as an Access Subscription and adds the user groups. |
| Charges automatic renewals and retries failed payments. | Ends access when its period is over and removes the groups, and emails customers whose access is about to run out. |
| Gives customers a portal for their invoices, payment methods and Paddle subscriptions. | Links to that portal, and shows customers what they have bought and the sites their licenses are used on. |
| Keeps the money: amounts, fees, tax and payouts. | Reads sales figures from Paddle for the dashboard. It never stores amounts of money itself. |
Because Paddle keeps your catalog, PaddleSubs stores only what your site needs locally: the Paddle identifiers, which Joomla category and level each product belongs to, the user groups, and the Access Subscriptions themselves. Names, descriptions and amounts are read from Paddle when a page shows them.