Ask HN: How do market place startups collect payments?

[keeptrying]

All marketplaces like (eg: Vayable) collect payments from one party and then send that payment to a third party after taking a cut. I've seen that most payment systems (including Paypal, Amazon, Google, Stripe) do not allow these kind of transactions per their terms of service.

These are known in the industry as Third Party Payment Aggregators (ie like Amazon, Paypal themselves) and its very hard if not impossible to get a payment service to take you on if your doing this kind of a business.

How do these startups get around this?

[LeBlanc]

WePay built its API specifically to solve this problem: https://stage.wepay.com/developer/usecases/marketplace

We allow easy account creation for your users, and you can charge your own fees on each transaction you facilitate.

I'm one of the API developers at WePay, so if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help.

[dgunn]

Do you guys have plans to allow styling the payment iframe? This is one advantage of the poundpay system that I really liked but as already stated, they're turning users away at the moment.

This may seem trivial, but, to me, the whole point of offering the iframe solution is to allow users the ability to never leave my website during the payment task-flow. But loading an iframe without my branding/styling removes a lot of the benefit.

[keeptrying]

Hi Andrew thanks for your post but I have a few more questions:

1. Are there marketplaces using this method? Can you name a few please?

2. How are refunds managed? Would the payee have to go directly to the 3rd party that he has paid the money to? What would be the liabilities of the middleman for a chargeback?

Thanks -Vivek

[ra]

Is wepay only available in the US? or is it available internationally?

[pg]

http://poundpay.com

[keeptrying]

They are turning away customers because of the same reason I put above.

[ig1]

You can use Paypal, but you need to use Paypal Adaptive Payments for it rather than a regular paypal account.

[keeptrying]

This requires the payer to create a paypal account which is a real problem.