We wanted to sell software licenses to customers in over 120 countries without any payment restrictions. The platform stores we had been using didn't allow direct sales in certain countries due to sanctions and regulatory compliance issues.
The Problem We Were Actually Solving
Our architecture was designed to handle the complexities of international payment processing, but the platform stores' limitations kept us from reaching a significant portion of the global market. Our revenue was stagnant, and we couldn't grow our customer base as much as we wanted. We had to decide whether to work around the limitations of the platform stores or create our own infrastructure to handle direct sales.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
Initially, we tried using third-party solutions that allowed us to bypass the payment restrictions, but these solutions came with high transaction fees, which cut into our revenue margins. We also implemented workarounds to manually process payments from restricted countries, but this introduced errors and inconsistencies in our bookkeeping. The system was brittle and prone to failures, and our customer support team was overwhelmed with inquiries about payment issues.
