

Ask HN: Payment solutions for a marketplace app? - jonny_noog

The project I'm currently working on is a marketplace style web app, facilitating sellers to sell their products to customers though the web app, with me taking a cut in the process. I've been doing some research on possible payment solutions tailored for this type of web app, I've come up with the Amazon FPS Marketplace and not much else at this point.<p>Can anyone give any guidance or the benefit of their experience with what might be some good options to investigate further?<p>The full merchant account/payment gateway option would be my least preferred, due to the seemingly higher costs involved, but if this option has enough advantages over something like Amazon FPS or Paypal in so far as enabling the marketplace style model I'm going for in the most user friendly way, perhaps the cost might be worth it? Particularly seeing as my ideal situation would be to have something as seamless as possible, such as:<p>1. Buyer places order via website and pays by CC without appearing to leave website<p>2. Buyer's payment is transferred directly to seller's bank account, minus my cut, notifications sent out to buyer and seller etc.<p>It appears that using Amazon FPS or Paypal would necessarily require more screwing around for the customer/buyer than this. But the lower cost of such options is attractive on the face of it, particularly as the ticket price of the products my prospective sellers will be selling is not huge and I'm realistically not expecting an immediately massive amount of orders to be processed through my site when it first goes live.<p>I'm not in the US.<p>Any comments much appreciated.
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bryanjohnson
I think you have two options. First, to become a payments aggregator as Dan
Manges pointed out. You would essentially be performing the same function as
Paypal does on ebay today: facilitating payments between buyers and sellers.
That's a very difficult model for a lot of reasons.

The second option you have is to use Paypal's adaptive payments. I'm not
familiar enough with it to know if it would fit your needs but it's the only
solution out there that potentially provides enough flexibility to do what you
want and get you out of aggregation.

I don't think Amazon's FPS has the flexibility or the international reach to
do what you need.

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jonny_noog
Looks like adaptive payments are available in my country, I'll check it out,
thanks.

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dan_manges
It can be difficult to get a credit card merchant account to do payments
aggregation: [http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/high-risk-
mech...](http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/high-risk-mechant-
account-third-party-payments-aggregation)

It might be easier to have the buyer's entire payment transferred to the
seller and then bill the seller for your cut separately.

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jonny_noog
Thanks for the comment and link.

