Payments with Paddle

Sidebar → Setup → Paddle

Taking card payments from your customers, into your own account.

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Your account, your money

You connect your own Paddle account. Your customers' payments go to you directly. The platform never touches that money and never takes a cut of it.

Paddle acts as merchant of record, which means they handle sales tax and VAT worldwide — a genuinely large amount of work you do not have to do.

This is Paddle Billing, their current product. If you have an older Paddle Classic account, you will need to move to Billing.

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Connecting

1. Get your credentials

In your Paddle dashboard, under Developer tools → Authentication:

• Seller ID — on your account page
• API key — create one
• Client-side token — create one

2. Enter them here

Setup → Paddle. Paste all three, and choose your mode:

• Sandbox while you are testing. Nothing is real, cards are fake.
• Live when you are selling.

3. Set up the webhook

Your Paddle settings page shows a webhook URL with a copy button. It ends in your username, and it is unique to you.

In Paddle, under Developer tools → Notifications, create a destination with that URL and subscribe to:

• transaction.completed
• subscription.created
• subscription.updated
• subscription.canceled
• adjustment.updated

Copy the signing secret Paddle gives you back into the Webhook secret field here, and save.

The webhook is not optional. Without it, a customer's payment succeeds at Paddle and nothing happens here — no plan, no credits.

4. Link your plans

Each plan you sell needs a matching price in Paddle. Create the product and price there, copy the price ID (pri_…), and paste it into the plan's Paddle price ID field.

A plan without a price ID cannot be bought with a card. It can still be granted by voucher.

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Testing before you go live

Do not skip this. It takes ten minutes and catches everything.

1. Set mode to Sandbox
2. Register as your own customer in a private window
3. Buy a plan with a Paddle test card
4. Check the credits arrive and the plan shows on their account
5. Cancel from the customer's billing page
6. Check the cancellation appears in Paddle too

When all six work, switch to Live and enter your live credentials. Sandbox and live credentials are different — you cannot reuse them.

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Refunds

Your customers → Payments. Find the payment and choose Refund.

You can refund in full or in part. When you do:

• The refund is raised with Paddle, and the money goes back
• The credits granted by that payment are reversed
• The subscription it paid for is ended
• The customer is emailed

The payment record stays. You will always be able to see what happened.

Refunds initiated inside Paddle reach here through the webhook and have the same effect, so it does not matter which side you start from.

Refunding a voucher works differently and is covered in Vouchers.

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Renewals

Paddle charges the card and tells the platform. The platform grants the next allowance and emails the customer.

Reminders go out before a renewal charge, and expiry notices before a voucher or manual plan runs out. Anyone who has already cancelled is left alone — telling somebody their card is about to be charged when they have cancelled is worse than saying nothing.

You control the wording of all of it in Emails.

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Cancellations

A customer cancelling from their billing page cancels at Paddle too. Their plan keeps working until the end of the period they have paid for, and then ends.

They are not refunded automatically — cancelling and refunding are different things. Refund from Payments if you want to give the money back as well.

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If something is not working

Payments succeed but nothing happens here. The webhook. Check the URL is exactly the one shown on your Paddle page, that the five events are subscribed, and that the signing secret matches.

Webhooks show as rejected in Paddle. Usually the secret. Copy it again — it is easy to miss a character.

A customer cannot check out. The plan has no Paddle price ID, or the price is not active in Paddle, or you are in sandbox mode with live credentials.

Test payments worked, real ones do not. Sandbox credentials left in place. Live mode needs live credentials, a live webhook destination, and live price IDs.

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Next: Vouchers