Update 004

Hello type designers!

It’s been a minute since I send out an email update (actually, around 2 1⁄2 years…) and Fontdue has come a long way since then: we’ve welcomed around 80 new foundries (too many to name individually this time) and released hundreds of new features and improvements.

On a personal note, it was my first time at AtypI this year, and I had such a blast meeting many of you in person and making some truly deep personal connections.

I also recently participated in an interview with type.today you can read here.

Today, I’m excited to announce a big update to the cart and checkout experience that has been in the works for some time.

Order variables

Foundries have been asking for better ways to scale pricing separately from license variables. Specifically, a better way to handle the “company size” model championed by Dinamo. Previously you would need to repeat the company size variable for each license. To improve this, we’ve added a new flexible system called Order variables – these are selections the customer can make separately from licenses.

We’re also making the “licensee” selection more of a conscious choice for the customer by requiring a selection for “license these fonts for: yourself / your client” – this connects the licensee selection to the “company size” selection, but we found this design to be an improvement over the previous “licensee information” checkbox even for foundries not using “company size.”

Thank you to HAL Typefaces and Erkin Karamemet for sponsoring and guiding this work.

Checkout improvements

With this new design, we took the opportunity to add more improvements to the checkout experience. Addresses are now autofilled for many countries, using the Google Places API, and we’ve consolidated the cart and checkout from a multi-step process into a single page.

Stripe Tax

We added support for Stripe Tax, which is now the default for new foundries. This improves tax collection for countries we already support, and adds tax support for many new countries.

You can opt-in to switch to Stripe Tax on the Tax settings page, and we’re deprecating our own solution for tax calculation.

Stripe Tax comes with additional Stripe fee: 0.5% per transaction in countries where you’re registered to collect taxes.

When you migrate to Stripe Tax, the checkout experience will use Stripe’s embedded checkout form. We recommend you test this out in test mode before migrating your live site.

E-invoicing

With Stripe Tax and the embedded checkout it’s now possible to automate issuing e-invoices through Stripe apps, which is becoming mandatory for many EU countries. We are recommending Billit which should support all of these countries. In order for this integration to work, you must turn on post-payment invoices in the Fontdue tax settings. Post-payment invoices come with an additional Stripe fee: 0.4% up to $2 (varies by country, find the “Checkout / Post-payment invoices” pricing here). We will still generate invoice PDFs separate from Stripe’s invoices and we do not recommend enabling post-payment invoices unless you require automated e-invoices.

…and more

There’s a ton more new stuff in this release, you can read about everything new as well as things we’ve released over the past on the What’s new page.

Update 004
Order variables
Checkout improvements
Stripe Tax
E-invoicing
…and more