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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

One thing I'm a bit confused about is the assertion that Stripe doesn't support marketplaces. However, it would seem like it's more accurate to say that Stripe does support "Collecting Fees" via Stripe Connect:

https://stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees

This might not be the full backend integration that some services require, but it does cover a lot of use cases and works in a growing list of countries outside of the US.

It also seems likely that Stripe could launch an ACH payout service of their own.

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Stripe does support marketplaces (https://stripe.com/connect), but with a somewhat different model.

Stripe Connect works by having each of your users connect their existing Stripe accounts to your application, or having them create a new one on the spot. It allows you to distance yourself from the flow of funds: the money will automatically route to your users' bank accounts (you can take a cut of it, if you want) and you don't have to worry about any chargeback/fraud liability.

This obviously doesn't cover all cases — for example, if you want to manage the flow of money manually, or you want to escrow funds.

(Disclaimer: I work on Connect at Stripe.)

Thanks, amfeng. Does the chargeback liability hit end merchants, or is that absorbed by Stripe? With Balanced, Gittip is responsible for it, and can choose whether to pass that along.

It hits the end merchants, since they're technically the merchant who is charging the credit card.

In cases where the marketplace wants to act purely as a platform (and not be involved in with the money in any way), this is perfect. You're exactly right that Stripe Connect isn't for the use case where you'd want to shield your users from that, though. (:

Word. I've added an update to the blog post with a link to Stripe Connect. :)

Oh, thanks! You definitely didn't have to do that, but we appreciate the mention. (:

Good to have this on the table, thanks. This was in private beta when I was working with Stripe. The two limitations here for Gittip are:

- Stripe Connect is not white label. All recipients (aka sellers, merchants) have to set up an account on Stripe's website. I'm not opposed to that in principle (cf. Dwolla), but I wanted Gittip to have an on-site baseline and add options from there.

- Stripe Connect is 1:1, and Gittip is N:M. I need to take $1 from 10 people and aggregate that into a single $10 payout. I also need to take a single $10 payin and split that up between 10 recipients. Stripe Connect doesn't work for crowd-funding, in other words.

Stripe Connect is a retrofit. Balanced is designed for marketplaces from the ground up.

Balanced also does next-day payouts. Using Stripe, it takes 7 days for the merchant to receive the funds

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