Why is there another company on my billing when I check my bank account?
How Novelcrafter's merchant of record works.
We handle our payments through a Merchant of Record (MoR) which is a fancy term for “they collect the money, and handle taxes and compliance, too”. Instead of dealing with us as a business directly, customers go to this intermediary who then handles all compliance and tax stuff for us. At the end of the month we get the payout, hassle-free. Since we operate on a global scale, staying compliant with country-specific regulations and taxation rules is hard without such a system in place. This also allows us to offer payments in various currencies which we don’t have to handle the conversion for.
As such, payments can never be deducted from us as “Novelcrafter” directly, and will always have to be listed with our MoR’s name instead. However, there are differences to this depending on your payment method:
When paying with a credit card, the transaction should contain a hint to our name, in addition to the MoR’s
When paying via PayPal the transaction will neither list our name, nor the product’s, but if you look into the payment details in the PayPal dashboard, it will show up in there (just not on your bank statement)
If you signed up for Novelcrafter pre-April, your payment is colleted through LemonSqueezy.
In April we changed out payment processor. With Paddle (our new MoR) they list how the payment will appear at the end of the invoice (e.g. for Credit Card payments we will appear as “NOVELCRFTR”, for PayPal payments there won’t be anything).