

Why I Love Balanced - whit537
http://whit537.org/2012/12/why-i-love-balanced.html

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jordanmessina
Shameless plug for my friends: I got an advanced copy of some chapters from
Traction Book (<http://tractionbook.com/>) which is where I read about the
traction vertical 'Engineering as Marketing'. I think this is an awesome
example of that.

I started using Balanced today, everyone is incredibly helpful in their IRC
channel, and integration is a breeze. It's a solid service.

What's worth noting about Balanced, you can use them solely for payouts, while
continuing to use some other gateway for processing.
<https://balancedpayments.com/docs/overview#id2>

~~~
whit537
I was wondering where you got that phrase. Too good to be true that you pulled
it out of thin air on the spot. Sounds like Balanced should be a case study in
your friends' book. ;)

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mjallday
If anyone's interested in contributing, one of the next things we've got lined
up for Gittip is integrating an ORM (It looks like we're going with
SqlAlchemy).

Join the discussion at <https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/129>

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jrosenblatt
They're Stripe for marketplaces, and they're great. (we've used them since
Sept at <https://crunchbutton.com>)

Question though: why doesn't Stripe support marketplaces?

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whit537
Marketplaces are higher risk and don't fit the agreements that Stripe has with
their bank partners. Deets:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/67>

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jamesnine
I've found that balanced is the best and easiest service to get payments to
our clients at a very rapid pace, with no non-sense. Their support team is
excellent as well!

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joonas
Having used Balanced for a couple months, I can attest to this, they are a
fantastic bunch providing support wherever, whenever and in whatever way they
can.

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markhelo
We use Balanced as well, having migrated from PoundPay. Everyone in their team
is attentive and pro-active. Support is fantastic.

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buro9
I love the look of this ( <https://www.balancedpayments.com/> ), is it just US
only and requires US bank accounts?

I have customers and sellers in the UK and would love to be able to offer an
escrow service and payment solution for them.

~~~
buro9
I'll reply to my own post as I've asked in the freenode #balanced room:

> 23:05 <mjallday> buro9: Balanced can debit cards from pretty much anywhere
> in the world. Payouts currently require a US bank account

> 23:05 <mjallday> buro9: you can subscribe to
> <https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23> to get updates when
> make we progress on the international payouts

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peteforde
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.

~~~
amfeng
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.)

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whit537
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.

~~~
amfeng
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. (:

~~~
whit537
Word. I've added an update to the blog post with a link to Stripe Connect. :)

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

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pulledpork
Did you look at Wepay or authorize.net? They both seem like they do money in
and out as well. I'd love to see a neutral party summarize the field for
payment processing as it's quite hard to see what the differences are without
doing some digging.

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whit537
WePay: <https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/69>

Authorize.net is pretty old-school, aren't they? I think of them as
complicated credit card payments. Do they also do payouts?

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cleancrowd
Balanced rocks. JW was super helpful and they are willing to work with us to
fit our needs. Looking forward to launching with them....

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eclipxe
I agree, Balanced is a great service. Thank you!

