Ask HN: How do market place startups collect payments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do market place startups collect payments?

9 pointskeeptrying15 comments

All marketplaces like (eg: Vayable) collect payments from one party and then send that payment to a third party after taking a cut. I've seen that most payment systems (including Paypal, Amazon, Google, Stripe) do not allow these kind of transactions per their terms of service.

These are known in the industry as Third Party Payment Aggregators (ie like Amazon, Paypal themselves) and its very hard if not impossible to get a payment service to take you on if your doing this kind of a business.

How do these startups get around this?

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WePay built its API specifically to solve this problem: https://stage.wepay.com/developer/usecases/marketplace

We allow easy account creation for your users, and you can charge your own fees on each transaction you facilitate.

I'm one of the API developers at WePay, so if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help.

Do you guys have plans to allow styling the payment iframe? This is one advantage of the poundpay system that I really liked but as already stated, they're turning users away at the moment.

This may seem trivial, but, to me, the whole point of offering the iframe solution is to allow users the ability to never leave my website during the payment task-flow. But loading an iframe without my branding/styling removes a lot of the benefit.

Yes, we do plan to allow style customization for the iframe content fairly soon. What kind of styling would you want to apply to the iframe content?

Basically everything to make it look as much like our site as possible.

For example, we have a textured background, so to begin with it would be nice if the iframe background was transparent by default. We have taken care of this, but we had to write a script to set it to transparent after it is generated by your script because your script gives it a white background by default.

We have styles applied to all input fields, we don’t use pure black text but instead a slightly off-black that has better contrast with our background color, we even use a web font from google. So as you can imagine, the frame looks pretty foreign on our page.

We would be more than willing to serve the sheet from our servers. Maybe we could provide you with a url and you could just add it to a link tag in the head of the page you serve.

We’re about to wrap up our wepay integration now, we’d be happy to be in a test group for something like this. I’m dave [at] soupnextdoor.com if you want a guinea pig.

[edit: clarification where needed]

Hi Andrew thanks for your post but I have a few more questions:

1. Are there marketplaces using this method? Can you name a few please?

2. How are refunds managed? Would the payee have to go directly to the 3rd party that he has paid the money to? What would be the liabilities of the middleman for a chargeback?

Thanks -Vivek

1) Yes, here are some marketplace type sites using the WePay API: http://bellstrike.com/ http://www.everribbon.com/ http://www.listcharming.com/ http://www.attendstar.com/

2) You can issue refunds for any payment in your marketplace with the /checkout/refund call. For chargebacks, we 1st attempt to get the money from the payee's WePay account, then from their bank account, and finally from the API application. We do a lot of really cool stuff that reduces the chargeback risk and fraud in general.

Is wepay only available in the US? or is it available internationally?

We do accept international credit cards, but unfortunately the person accepting money has to be in the United States. We're working hard to expand internationally though!

Let me know when you can accept merchants in Australia!

http://poundpay.com

They are turning away customers because of the same reason I put above.

You can use Paypal, but you need to use Paypal Adaptive Payments for it rather than a regular paypal account.

This requires the payer to create a paypal account which is a real problem.

I don't think they have to. Fiverr uses Paypal Adaptive Payments and I've bought stuff on there without using a Paypal account.

I use Paypal to charge my own customers (not using adaptive payments) and I had to upgrade my account to a business account before I could let customers pay without having to have a Paypal account. I'm guessing something similar applies to Adaptive Payments.

This is actually great information. Thanks a lot!

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