I was thinking escrow for my startup originally but stripe apps offer a different approach - i.e. cash goes straight from tenant to customer with fees (including a handling fee paid to you) deducted directly from the tenant.
It's a nice alternative to a straight-up escrow setup.
Many marketplaces want to avoid the liability for transactions that take place on their platform. This is specifically why we built Stripe Connect (https://stripe.com/connect). It allows the marketplace to provide a way to accept payments to their sellers. The buyers and sellers can the transact with each other and the marketplace avoids liability.
Balanced provides the ability to pass disputes onto the seller, but the marketplace ultimately has full liability for chargebacks, fraud, and so on.
With Stripe Connect, each seller is responsible for charges run through their own Stripe account. This removes any liability from the marketplace, and is really useful if you want to purely be a platform of facilitating payments and don’t actually want to be involved in the risk and complexity of handling any of the money.
Example: Buyer pays $10, seller gets $9, marketplace gets $1.
The money from the credit card payment gets routed to your seller automatically (and we split off the application fee to send to your Stripe account). You never touch the rest of the funds, so you're never responsible for any chargebacks or refunds.
A lot of the successful marketplaces these days (e.g. Airbnb) have decided to fully intermediate the payments on their platform for security reasons. They find escrow is a way to promote trust and security on their platform. Most third-party payment platforms don't allow for this. Even eBay, which uses the most popular 3rd party payments platform of all (PayPal) had to initiate a $5000 "PayPayl guarantee" to encourage sales. Other marketplaces, like Etsy, are moving away from PayPal and building their own intermediated payments system to have a similar experience as Airbnb. My understanding is that Stripe Connect is great for store builders like Shopify, which are disaggregated, but less attractive to marketplaces like Airbnb.