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Key Takeaways About a Merchant of Record for Mobile Games:
- A merchant of record sells digital goods on behalf of online businesses and takes on the legal liability and financial setup of selling those digital goods internationally.
- Game publishers can use a merchant of record such as FastSpring to monetize their web stores and make international selling simple.
- FastSpring is especially qualified to serve as the merchant of record for mobile games because it helps publishers avoid high app marketplace fees, increases global reach quickly, provides award-winning customer service and consumer support, and more.
Market options have continued to open up for both publishers and players in the mobile games industry thanks to shifting laws and regulations around the world. (More details on those below.)
Because of these developments, mobile gaming companies are investigating more options for monetizing their games than just the App Store or Play Store.
So where do you start if you want to provide more global payment solutions to your player base while chipping away at the hefty 30% fees that mobile marketplaces charge?
With a merchant of record like FastSpring.
Read on to find out more about:
- What a merchant of record is, and why it’s a really slick and easy way to increase sales for your mobile games.
- How the mobile games industry is changing to allow alternative monetization options.
- Why FastSpring is especially qualified to help your mobile game make more money through your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game.
FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.
What Is a Merchant of Record?
Very simply, a merchant of record (MoR) is a legal entity that sells digital services or goods to a customer. This means that companies can choose to be their own MoR, but they can also outsource this work to a company that takes on those legal liabilities and handles the financial setup behind the scenes for them.
With the merchant of record model, you can let your MoR provider worry about local and international payment processing, regulatory compliance, and global tax compliance, because the MoR will be the entity accepting global payments and selling the product.
That leaves gaming businesses like yours free to focus on developing great games instead of worrying about local payment methods, currency conversion, fraud prevention, tax collection and remittance, and more.
How Is an MoR Different From a Payment Service Provider?
Payment service providers (PSPs) do some of the same things MoRs do, but only up to a certain point.
Both PSPs and MoRs bridge the gap from businesses to the specialized financial services and networks that are needed in the background to sell a product and process payments, including payment gateways, payment processors, and merchant accounts.
Both options will also likely include ecommerce platform tools and/or integration functionality; the options will vary from provider to provider.
But PSPs don’t go that extra step of taking on the liabilities of card brand rules, risk and fraud, taxes, or the regulatory rules that differ across regions and countries the way that MoRs do.
Some PSPs may have options that allow you to upgrade their services closer to that of an MoR, but that will mean their fees will go up, and the options may be bolted on rather than built in. (For example, Stripe’s fraud prevention upgrade, Radar, costs additional fees per transaction.)
Monetizing Your Mobile Game Outside of App Marketplaces
Thanks to various legal changes around the world, mobile game developers are finding that the mobile game market is more open than ever in terms of how they can sell and monetize their games.
(If you’re not yet familiar with them, you can read up on various U.S. cases against Apple and Google, the EU Digital Markets Act, Apple’s agreement to make App Store changes to comply with Brazil’s competition regulator CADE, and steering-friendly regulatory laws in Japan, for starters. These are all in some way related to the exclusive, “gatekeeper”-like relationships that smartphone companies like Apple and Google have maintained between smartphone users and mobile app developers via proprietary smartphone marketplaces.)
Check out FastSpring’s Industry News archive for continually updated steering and regulatory news from around the world.
There are many ways game developers could approach this freedom to sell direct to consumers (D2C), but one of the easiest is to partner with a merchant of record that can help you sell items or premium currency in game, on your website, or in your web shop.
How to Use an MoR to Monetize Your Mobile Game
Using an MoR to monetize your mobile game starts with integrating it into your web store to sell in-game currency, skins, battle passes, etc.
It’s easy to integrate FastSpring into your existing web shop, or we can help you build a web store that’s optimized for your players and your game’s brand.
Integration only takes a few simple steps:
- You set up your products in FastSpring (we’ll take care of currency and payment method localization for you).
- Drop a few lines of our modern customizable JavaScript library code onto your site.
- Use our orders webhooks to grant in-game item access when a purchase is made.
Read more details about using an MoR to monetize your game in How to Sell a Mobile App or Game Outside App Stores, or check out our FastSpring-specific walkthrough guide, How to Implement Direct to Consumer Sales for Video Games With FastSpring.
Why Game Publishers Love Using FastSpring as Their MoR Provider
FastSpring has been a payment provider since 2005, and we’re the merchant of record that gaming publishers can use to sell games or in-game items on their websites, in their web shops, or even embedded directly into their games.
Here are just a few of the reasons mobile game and video game developers trust us to help them sell their games all over the world.
Avoid App Store Transaction Fees
By using an MoR like FastSpring to sell games or in-game items D2C, game developers can avoid or lower high marketplace transaction fees, which have commonly hovered around 30%. (These fees have lowered slightly due to ongoing regulatory changes around the world, but not by much.)
This is many times higher than what a merchant of record like FastSpring charges, which means you’ll be able to keep much more of the revenue your game generates.
Increase Global Reach Quickly
The barriers to entry for selling games, SaaS, and other digital products into even one new country can be high if you want to do it all in house. That can include establishing a legal entity, getting up to date on local taxes and regulatory rules, set up financial details such as payment processing and merchant accounts, learning what preferred currencies and languages you need your checkout to show to local buyers, and more — and you can multiply that times the number of countries you want to sell into.
With FastSpring, all of that is handled for you, for 200+ regions. You’ll only need to set up FastSpring to immediately start selling into new markets and geos. And if you need help, our award-winning support teams are here to help.
Award-Winning Customer Support
Whether it’s for initial setup, ongoing technical support, or even consumer support for your players, FastSpring works hard to cover you.
In fact, we’ve upped our support game so much that awards are starting to roll in!
In 2024, our support team won a Silver Stevie® award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year in the “Technology Industries – Computer Software” category, and in 2026, our customer success team won a silver Globee® award for Customer Excellence in the “Customer Support Team Achievement” category!
Don’t take it from us alone. Read more about why Nexus.gg had a great experience switching to FastSpring, or find out why Out of the Park Developments were “absolutely thrilled” with FastSpring (including how FastSpring helped them quadruple their game’s sales in South Korea alone).
Customizable Checkouts
FastSpring offers multiple types of checkout options to help accommodate your vision and gamers’ convenience.
Whether you want a seamless embedded or modal pop-up checkout experience in game or on your website, we’re flexible and offer many tools to help you customize the experience. FastSpring’s developer tools include extensions, webhooks, APIs, a WordPress plugin, the FastSpring Store Builder Library (our JavaScript library), AI-assisted documentation search, step-by-step developer project videos, and more.
Payment Method, Language, and Currency of Choice
Besides enabling you to customize and brand your checkout to best suit your business in general, FastSpring will handle the price localization details. This includes which payment methods are offered, which languages are displayed, and which currencies customers can buy in.
FastSpring will automatically select the best region-specific payment methods and currency to display, but you can also customize which currencies are supported when you configure your store.
To ensure buyers have the smoothest buying experience possible, FastSpring supports many local currencies, languages, and the top payment methods used in 200+ regions globally. That includes debit and credit cards, digital wallets like Google Pay and PayPal, and preferred regional payments like Pix and AliPay.
When your game is monetized, the buying experience is part of the gaming experience, and a familiar checkout experience will help ensure your player base doesn’t have to think twice about supporting your game.
Read more about the importance of pricing localization with examples from Twitch and Out of the Park Developments.
Tax Compliance
Worrying about the international taxes that come with selling globally? Or which U.S. states have changed their sales tax nexus? Or if you’re staying current with all the different value-added tax VAT regulations in the EU?
With FastSpring, you don’t have to.
As the merchant of record, we’re responsible for handling sales taxes, goods and services tax (GST), and VAT. That means that not only will we calculate how much tax needs to be collected, but we’ll also collect it and remit it.
With FastSpring, you’ll automatically be tax compliant.
Read a story from our senior tax director about how she helped a European software company in a situation with an African taxing authority.
Fraud Prevention and Risk Management PLUS Better Access to Your Own Players
Fraud prevention and risk management are intrinsic to the merchant of record model, and FastSpring is committed to protecting your software or game company from risk while managing global regulatory compliance.
That may seem like it should be obvious, but there are a few aspects of fraud prevention and risk management — especially for mobile games — that can be less obvious at first, but which are important to understand to optimize your D2C strategy.
For one, using major app marketplaces like the Apple App Store and Google Play Store means you get to take advantage of their resource-intensive fraud engines, which are great at absorbing fraud risk without you needing to worry about it directly. But in exchange, you have no view on how many good players have been blocked, no choice in refunds, and no control over your chargeback process.
For another, fraud and fraud prevention are often framed as simply keeping the bad actors out. But it’s actually the combination of letting as many good players in while also keeping the bad ones out that makes for top-tier risk management.
If you leave the perceived safety of the app marketplaces to venture out on your own into D2C monetization, you may worry about fraud increasing. But the only way to entirely prevent D2C fraud would be to stop D2C — just as the only way to entirely prevent in-app fraud would be to stop in-app purchases.
If you choose an experienced and trusted MoR such as FastSpring, you get exceptional coverage against bad actors across your web store and checkout. But you also get fraud controls calibrated to your live ops and your players, transparency on blocked transactions and chargebacks, and actionable data that lets you recalibrate player controls to keep your in-game economy healthy.
We partner with global leaders like Sift for risk analysis and fraud prevention, and we comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Additionally, we have advanced, gaming-specific fraud protection and risk management features built specifically for video games, and for the types of transaction fraud that game developers are likely to encounter. Specific fraud rules can be applied just for your games, and risky behavior patterns can be learned and applied across all our video game customers to help proactively prevent chargebacks and loss of revenue. We even provide you with the ability to dynamically flag players as not trusted (e.g., new players) or safe (e.g., whales).
Gaming AND Ecommerce Experts on Your Team
FastSpring is uniquely positioned as the only D2C provider that couples deep gaming expertise with deep ecommerce expertise.
We have industry insiders on our team who have led D2C, product, monetization, and marketing at top publishers — so we understand how players behave, how live-ops works, and what it takes for a store to feel like an extension of your game rather than a bolt-on.
But our team is also backed by 20+ years of real ecommerce expertise, including web store optimization, payment orchestration, conversion rate optimization, fraud protection, and localization at global scale — the type of expertise that supports better approval rates and increased revenue.
Having the gaming expertise and ecommerce expertise that FastSpring has is a 1+1=3 equation for your D2C strategy.
Chargeback Management
Chargebacks are returns that levy a fee, and as the MoR, FastSpring is responsible for keeping fraud rates and chargebacks under specific thresholds that card networks set. When chargebacks inevitably happen, FastSpring has built-in chargeback management features to help manage and reduce chargebacks on your behalf.
This includes our Chargeback Overview Dashboard, which allows you to see and react to chargebacks and enables you to take proactive steps to limit fraudulent chargebacks and resolve valid ones.
Read more about our policies and procedures regarding refunds and chargebacks in our documentation.
Partner With FastSpring
FastSpring is how gaming studios sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you.
FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, subscription management, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games!
To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg, or request a personalized demo.
This article was originally published in Oct. 2024 and has been updated.
