If you sell online courses to an international audience, you are probably aware of the EU VAT MOSS and how a Merchant of Record (MoR) can help you with this because they not only collect all the taxes on your behalf, but they also take the responsibility of filing the taxes in the respective countries.
Here are 6 ideas to handle Merchant of Record for online courses
Non-WordPress options
Udemy
The first option is the easiest one – you can sell through an online course platform like Udemy, which means Udemy is the seller and they become responsible for the taxes etc.
Udemy handles everything for you (such as video hosting) and because people are already searching for courses to buy, you also get the benefit of access to a marketplace of buyers.
However, your course will now be competing with every other course on the topic. And Udemy is famous for deep discounts on their courses, which means your earning per course will not be very high. And they take a fairly large cut of the revenue.
But Udemy only makes money when you make money, so it is a way to get started if you don’t want to shell out any money up front.
Teachable
Teachable allows you to use your own domain or subdomain and sell your online courses and they also act as the Merchant of Record
Teachable also handles most of the things (such as video hosting). However, it has become quite pricey for people who sell a lot of online courses, and you are responsible for marketing your course.
Mini Course Generator
This new course platform allows you to use LemonSqueezy (an MoR) as one of the payment gateways
Mini Course Generator (MCG) is fairly new, so the stuff I am writing now (Feb 2025) may not be relevant by the time you read the article.
MCG uses a “everything is a card” model for building courses. This is quite easy to do, but it does take a bit of time to get used to it.
MCG also has some very nice AI integrations – you can use it to generate thumbnail images for your courses and lessons etc. They also have a way to generate a course using an outline, but I did not find the AI generated course particularly informative.
They support LemonSqueezy out of the box, however the integration is per-course (which isn’t MCG’s fault – it has more to do with the feature set available from LemonSqueezy itself).
WordPress options
Masteriyo
If you are using WordPress, you can use the Masteriyo plugin which allows you to sell LemonSqueezy integration. Please notice that this does not use WooCommerce but rather provides a direct integration with LemonSqueezy.
This may be the best plugin if you are already using WordPress.
WooCommerce Plugins
Another option is to use WooCommerce Plugins which extend WooCommerce to provide support for Merchant of Record services like Paddle and LemonSqueezy.
I have tried these plugins, and do not recommend them
Why I avoid WooCommerce Merchant of Record Plugins for LMS
There are three problems with using WooCommerce MoR plugins with your online course.
First, they are not very easy to integrate into your LMS unless you are a programmer.
Second, I have found that student user management is a lot more challenging when you use these duct tape solutions.
And finally, it is a fairly large added cost to your (probably) paid LMS plugin, so it isn’t even a great idea from a purely monetary perspective.
For the price you would pay for a WooCommerce MoR plugin, you can just use Masteriyo and use its built-in LemonSqueezy integration.
Add MoR as a custom payment gateway to WooCommerce
This requires custom WooCommerce development.
You can find some tutorials about this online, but I do not recommend this unless you are already an experienced WooCommerce developer.
Bonus: LearnDash + Zoho Flow
If you are using LearnDash (I have used it in the past) you can do some customizations which will allow you use Zoho Flow to build an automation which will allow you to enroll a student into your LearnDash course once they complete payment on LemonSqueezy.
(Zoho Flow is a Zapier alternative. You can also use Zapier for doing this, but Zoho Flow is less expensive, and is included for free if you are a Zoho One customer)
This also requires some custom coding and unfortunately the user experience for this will still be quite clunky (especially for the check to see if the user is already logged in).
It only makes sense if you already use both LearnDash and Zoho Flow, and I just wanted to highlight that this is also an option.