Polar as your Merchant of Record.
A Payment Service Provider like Stripe routes money between your customer and your bank. It's a powerful abstraction for processing transactions, but it stops there: the merchant on every receipt is still you, which means the tax liability for every international sale is also still yours.
A Merchant of Record sits one layer higher. Polar buys the digital good from you and resells it to your customer, which makes us the merchant for that specific sale. As a consequence, international sales tax (VAT, GST, US Sales Tax, and the rest) is owed by us, not you.
What stays with you is the customer relationship. The renewals, the support, and the product experience are all yours. We sit underneath, handling the regulatory layer the customer never has to think about.
Sell into every country we support. We monitor thresholds and expand registrations as our volume grows.
Every order ships with a compliant invoice and the right VAT, GST, or Sales Tax line.
We're on the hook for capturing and remitting international sales tax.
VAT-registered EU businesses get reverse-charge handling automatically.
Tax compliance is more than charging the right rate at checkout. Polar takes the full chain, from the moment money is captured to the moment it's remitted.
Polar takes the international tax exposure as your Merchant of Record.