Why switching from Stripe to Balanced has helped LaunchTrack scale
support.launchtrack.com
support.launchtrack.com
Why are they bashing Stripe Connect, which is not comparable to Balanced? They were looking for Stripe Marketplace, which does offer a complete white-label solution.
For a fairer comparison and review of Stripe's white label marketplace API, I will shamelessly plug my blog:
http://blog.chriswinn.com/working-with-stripe-payouts
The people at Balanced are great, but I still prefer Stripe's products any day of the week. They've written the best API and documentation I've seen in a while, and laid a lot of groundwork for others to mimic. A good thing for us developers, at least.
Stripe Connect is not a complete white label solution. The user still has to be redirected to stripe.com to complete the OAuth process. We had many issues with users being confused as to who Stripe was, and why were they asking for their personal information when creating an account.
Stripe Connect is great for a certain kind of marketplace, specifically one that does not want to be liable for chargebacks or refunds and wants to remain outside of the flow of funds.
We launched the ability to send payouts with Stripe over a month ago for a different kind of marketplace (such as Lyft, SideCar and Exec), which want more control over the payout process. You can read more about it here on our site: https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe
-The process to make charges from a sellers account seems to need an unnecessary amount of requests
-Why can't we pay out to multiple sellers at once like Paypal can?
-At least in Stripe, it seems kind of silly I have to refresh a credit card token each time I want to make a new charge
https://support.stripe.com/questions/can-i-save-a-card-and-c...
If you're looking to split payments to multiple parties, you may want to take a look at sending transfers, rather than using Connect: https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe
This only requires the sellers' bank account information in order to pay them out.
Stripe provides a Customer abstraction that makes it easy to save credit card information for later and use it multiple times. Instead of charging the card immediately, you can create a new Customer object and save the card to that customer. See more here: https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges#saving-credit-card...
Let's a say a customer bought $100 worth of items from two different sellers. You owe the sellers $40 each and you want to keep the rest. Here's how you'd handle that:
1) Charge the card (https://stripe.com/docs/api#charges) the full amount of the purchase ($100). 2) Subtracting Stripe's fees, you'd see $96.80 appear in your Stripe balance (https://stripe.com/docs/api#balance). 3) Initiate a transfer to seller 1 (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers) for $40 (this costs $0.25) 4) Initiate a transfer to seller 2 (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers) for $40 (this costs $0.25). 5) You'll have $16.30 remaining in your balance. You can then transfer that to your own bank account (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers) and we don't charge any fees for paying yourself out.
In order to pay out to two separate people, you'd need to make 2 POST requests to transfers#create (at least as far as I can find in Stripe's documentation). I feel like instead of one transfer at a time, it should be both transfers at once. Say you have a cart with 5 items in it. That means 5 separate POST requests, when this seems kind of unnecessary -- why not send them and process them all at once? PayPal supports this behavior, so why not Stripe?
In other words, a request might look like
{ charges: [ {seller_id: 12, amount: 400}, {seller_id: 13, amount: 400}, {seller_id: 14, amount: 400}, {seller_id: 15, amount: 400} ] card_number: 1283123412341234 ... }
dylandrop's already commented, but would love to get others' input