Most licensing writeups stop at “we generate keys.” The more useful question is: who generates them, and when?
If the answer is “you, after checking your inbox,” you have a part-time job attached to every sale. Marketplace automation removes that job entirely. Here’s exactly how it works.
The default workflow, without automation
Without automation, a sale on Tebex, BuiltByBit, or Polymart looks like this:
- Customer pays.
- You get a notification (maybe).
- You log into your dashboard and create a license.
- You copy the key and email it, or reply to their marketplace message.
- You hope you didn’t fat-finger the expiry date or attach it to the wrong plugin.
Every step is a place to be slow, asleep, or wrong. None of it requires human judgment. It’s pure data plumbing from “payment succeeded” to “key exists and the customer has it.”
What actually happens when a store is linked
Linking a marketplace to a plugin means MC License listens for that platform’s purchase event for the linked package or resource. When a purchase completes:
- The purchase event arrives at MC License with the buyer’s identity for that platform (Tebex transaction, BuiltByBit user, Polymart account) and the product/resource ID.
- A license key is generated immediately, using the plugin’s default settings, the same
maxIpsandexpiresOnvalues you’d set manually when creating a license by hand. - The key is emailed to the customer, along with plain instructions for activating it in the plugin, no support ticket required on your end.
- The license lands on your dashboard as a fully normal license. Not a shadow record, not read-only: you can open it, edit the expiry, change the IP limit, disable it, or delete it exactly like a license you created by hand.
Step 2 is the part people miss: automation doesn’t mean “generic license.” It respects whatever defaults you configured for that plugin, so a Basic-tier customer and a Professional-tier customer can still get different expiry windows if that’s how you’ve set your plugin up.
What’s platform-specific
The three marketplaces don’t expose the same data, so the setup differs slightly:
- Tebex: you link a webstore to the plugin. Purchases against that store’s linked package trigger issuance. Delivery is instant; there’s no polling delay between payment and key.
- BuiltByBit: licenses generated from a BuiltByBit purchase originally showed the buyer’s raw profile URL rather than their username, because resolving a username requires calling BuiltByBit’s own API. If you’re on BuiltByBit’s Ultimate seller tier, supplying your own BBB API token turns on username resolution, and it doesn’t just apply going forward, it backfills every existing license that’s missing one, in the background, without you doing anything.
- Polymart: resource linking works the same way. Link the resource ID, purchases against it issue keys identically.
What automation doesn’t do for you
Worth being straight about this: automation issues the key. It doesn’t:
- Revoke on refund. If a marketplace processes a refund or chargeback, the license isn’t automatically disabled, because “license issued” and “license should still be valid” are two different questions, and platforms don’t all expose refund events cleanly enough to automate that safely by default. You still need to check refund notices and disable the license yourself, same as before automation existed. It’s one click, but it’s still a click.
- Handle transfers. If a customer wants their key moved to a different email or a teammate takes over their server, that’s still a manual edit.
- Replace your own judgment on abuse. Automation issues a key for every completed purchase; if you’re dealing with a chargeback-and-repurchase pattern, that’s on you to notice, same as it would be with manual issuance.
So the honest framing is: automation removes the busywork of legitimate purchases, which is the overwhelming majority of transactions. It doesn’t remove the handful of cases that were always going to need a human anyway.
Setting it up
If you’re already selling on Tebex, BuiltByBit, or Polymart and issuing keys by hand, linking your store takes a few minutes from the plugin’s settings page, and every sale from that point on is zero-touch. See the Tebex setup docs for a walkthrough of the exact steps.