WERE YOU BITTEN BY HIDDEN FEES?

"I talk a lot about transparency."

In conversations, conference talks and interviews, I’ve called out how the Merchant of Record & D2C industry must improve around chargeback transparency. How pushing risk onto the studio or developer is wrong, when the payment partner makes the decision. Not marketing fluff, not financial, but morally. This is why Tebex covers the entire cost of every chargeback - from fees to absorbing losses, you never pay a cent.

But that’s not enough.

Here’s the industry today. Every MoR routinely publishes one “platform fee,” often 4-5%, printed cleanly on a website or in a pitch deck. Then your report arrives, and that fee turns out to be the opening line of a menu: payment method fees, FX, chargeback fees, money repatriation fees, the list goes on. You make a $100 sale. Depending on who you’re with, what payment method was used, the customer’s country and 50 other things, you keep $90. Or $75. Nobody tells you which, until it’s already happened.

How do you run a business on that? You can’t plan headcount or marketing spend when a sale might return 90 cents on the dollar, or 75. And one bad month of chargebacks, on terms you never set, can wipe out a quarter of cashflow you had no way to forecast.

I am not suggesting the industry is intentionally hiding fees - our own pricing worked exactly the same way until recently. But precedent does not make it right. This is why we’re changing our pricing: each transaction will have one transaction fee, nothing added on. Every transaction - regardless of payment method, creator codes/affiliate sales, payouts and FX - handled the same way. Every studio deserves to know what a $100 transaction returns, who pays when a chargeback hits, and who is on the hook for FX - our aim is to make that a one-line answer for everyone we work with.

I’m also extending an open invitation - any MoRs and D2C providers in this space who look at this and think “you know what, Liam’s got a point” - let’s chat, let’s work together to improve transparency, publishing an all-in rate, the number a developer actually keeps, so everyone knows even before a purchase happens what they’re going to receive. Let’s build a standard, rather than compete on hidden fees.

I talk a lot about transparency. This is what acting on it looks like.

Liam Wiltshire, VP and General Manager, Tebex