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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I have a major frustration with payment providers — even contemporary players like Stripe — that can't offer a 3rd party payments system. That is, anything resembling a "marketplace" where you sell things on behalf of someone else, take a cut and pass on the rest to the content creator requires the integrator to come up with a half-assed payout pipeline. This often results in sending cheques and/or making PayPal payments.

My dream would be a product offering that offered pass-through payment processing, so my vendors have an account and give my store a key. Payments go directly to the vendor, and a pre-negotiated amount or percentage is automatically collected and sent to me. Both me and the vendor pay the same processing rate.

I have several concepts I'd love to build and launch, but all of them fall down because I can't easily justify a 2x2.9% transaction fee.

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Actually, you can do this with Stripe Connect [1]. The end-user signs up with a Stripe account, you get an OAuth key, and can make charges on their account. You can also collect fees on top of any payments [2].

[1]: https://stripe.com/docs/connect [2]: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees

Thank you so much! I don't know how I missed that.

Here you go :)

http://balancedpayments.com

Thanks for the link! I didn't specify that it would have to work outside of the US, which is my mistake.

That said, I had no idea this existed and it's definitely on my radar now. Thank you again.

Have you thought about forming a US corporation (C Corp or LLC)? Yes, you would have to pay some taxes, but you could choose a low/ no tax burden state like Delaware or Wyoming.

Assign a local agent, with physical/ mailing address, and open a US business banking account is pretty much all there is to it (not all). I've actually considered offering this as a service, but convincing myself there is an actual need has been difficult.

If you can reduce the act of registering a Delaware C Corp and opening a US bank account to entering my billing details, you'll have my business.

I understand Balanced is trying very hard to get into CA as well, so they may be a viable solution for you soon.

I think both Amazon Flexible Payments and PayPal Adaptive Payments support everything you're asking for. They're separate products from Amazon Simple Payments and PayPal Website Standard / PayPal Pro which, as you know, can't be used for that kind of business.

Sadly, Amazon doesn't support Canadians yet.

I have a personal policy: I will never build a business that relies on a PayPal product. I've read too many horror stories about frozen accounts where people were punished for being successful to risk my client's money with them.

I've been on the receiving end of it so believe me when I say it royally sucks

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