When someone pays on your form, the charge happens on your payment account — Stripe, Authorize.net, or CardPointe — and the money settles to your bank. Legally, you are the seller — the merchant of record — not Maxforms. That means the responsibilities that come with selling are yours: collecting and remitting any tax you owe, issuing refunds, and answering disputes.
Where the money goes#
Payments are charged directly on the account you connected. Maxforms never holds or forwards your money — there is no Maxforms balance, and no waiting on Maxforms for a payout. Your provider settles funds to your bank on its own schedule: Stripe on the payout schedule you set in Stripe, Authorize.net and CardPointe on your merchant account's settlement terms.
What being the merchant of record means for you#
- Taxes. If the payments you collect are taxable — sales tax, VAT, or anything else — working out what you owe, charging it, and remitting it is your responsibility. Maxforms doesn't calculate or withhold tax on your form payments. If you're unsure what applies to you, ask a tax professional.
- Refunds. You decide when to refund a respondent, and the refund comes out of your account with the provider. You can issue refunds from inside Maxforms or from your provider's dashboard — see Refunds and disputes.
- Disputes and chargebacks. If a cardholder disputes a payment, the dispute is between them and you, and you respond to it in your provider's dashboard.
- Your name on the statement. Because the charge is on your account, your business details from the provider are what the respondent's bank statement and receipt show.
Fees#
Two kinds of fees apply to a payment:
- Your provider's processing fees, charged at the rates in your agreement with Stripe, Authorize.net, or CardPointe.
- A Maxforms platform fee on each successful payment. On Stripe it is deducted from the payment automatically before the payout. On Authorize.net and CardPointe the full amount settles to your account and Maxforms bills its fee separately.
Your provider's dashboard shows the processing fees on every payment, so the net amount you receive is always visible there.
Separately, you can add your own fee line for respondents (for example, to pass on processing costs) with the Enable fee option on the payment field — that fee is added to what the respondent pays and comes to you.
What Maxforms does for you#
Maxforms runs the checkout on your form, marks each submission Paid, Processing, Failed, or Refunded as your provider reports what happened, and records refunds against the submission. It also alerts you when a Stripe payment is disputed and when a connected account stops being able to charge. Think of it this way: Maxforms is your storefront; your payment provider is your till; the business behind both is you.