Connect Paddle to SiteOps
Paddle is a merchant of record: it does not just process your payments, it legally sells your product for you. Paddle handles the checkout, works out VAT and sales tax for every country your buyers live in, deals with invoices and chargebacks, and pays you out the remainder. That is why the revenue Paddle knows about is unusually clean — tax is already accounted for, so the numbers are what your business actually earned.
Connecting Paddle puts those numbers inside SiteOps, on the same screen as your traffic and your ad spend. You stop guessing whether a busy week made money, and you stop reconciling a payment dashboard against a marketing dashboard by hand — the real revenue and the marketing that drove it sit side by side.
The connection uses an API key you create yourself in Paddle's Developer tools, scoped to read-only. It can look at transactions, subscriptions and customers, and it can change nothing — no charges, no refunds, no plan edits, no matter what. This guide walks you through creating exactly that key, click by click.
Set it up, step by step
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- Developer tools
- Authentication
- Developer tools
- Authentication
- New API key
The read-only key's journey — from live Paddle to one SiteOps field - Settings
- Connections
- Paddle
Let an agent do it
A browser agent working in your signed-in Paddle dashboard can click through the key creation with exactly the right read-only permissions.
Create a read-only API key in my Paddle dashboard.
1. I am signed in at vendors.paddle.com. Confirm the address bar does NOT say sandbox-vendors.paddle.com — the key must be a live key (pdl_live_), not a sandbox one (pdl_sdbx_).
2. Go to Developer tools, then Authentication, and start creating a new API key.
3. Name it SiteOps. If an expiry is required, pick the longest option offered.
4. In the permissions list, set Read access on Transactions, Subscriptions and Customers. Leave every other permission — and every Write permission — off.
5. Save and show me the full key value once, so I can paste it into SiteOps myself. Do not store it anywhere else.
6. Do not touch any existing keys on that page.Signing in to Paddle is yours alone — never hand an agent your Paddle password — and you paste the finished key into SiteOps yourself, so it never sits in a chat log.
If something does not work
- The revenue card shows zero after connecting
- Three checks, in order. First: is the key a live key? A pdl_sdbx_ key was made in the sandbox and only sees test transactions — create a new one at vendors.paddle.com. Second: open the key in Paddle and confirm Transactions, Subscriptions and Customers have Read access. Third: does the account actually have live sales yet? A new Paddle account correctly shows zero until the first real transaction.
- I created the key but did not copy it in time
- Paddle shows a key in full only once. Revoke that key on the Authentication page and create a fresh one with the same read-only permissions — a minute's work, and nothing else changes.
- The numbers do not exactly match my Paddle dashboard
- Usually timing and definitions. SiteOps shows revenue by transaction date in your project's time range, while Paddle reports may group by payout, net off refunds and fees differently, or use another timezone. If the shape of the chart matches and the gap is small, the connection is fine.
- Can SiteOps refund a customer or change a plan through this key?
- No — and it cannot be talked into it either. The key you made is read-only, so Paddle itself refuses any write. And SiteOps treats every payment provider as read-only forever: there is no refund button, no plan editor, no code path that writes to Paddle. Billing stays entirely in your hands.
- I want to disconnect — what happens to the data
- Revoke the key in Paddle (Developer tools, Authentication) or press Disconnect in SiteOps settings. Either way access stops immediately: SiteOps stops seeing new transactions and the revenue card stops updating. Nothing in your Paddle account is affected.