Stripe. Transfer money from two stripe balances to one Connected account - stripe-payments

We need a possibility to have two balances on our stripe platform: first for our platform commission (balance1) and second for saving vauchers money (balance2).
Is it possible to make a transfers from this both balances to on connected account?

This is something you would keep track off on your end. Stripe would aggregate the balance in that case and just give you a number for the amount available and a number for the amount pending. You can not have split balances specific to your business.
I would recommend reaching out to Stripe to discuss your business model and what you are trying to achieve though since it's not specifically about code or Stripe's API.

Related

Stripe connect. Transferring payment to a connected account charges fees on the main account

I have account B connected to account A (both are standard accounts).
What I'm trying to do: accept a payment through A and send the full amount to B, which then gets charged the corresponding Stripe fees.
What I did: Created a webhook that fires on charge.succeeded and does a transfer to the connected account (B), using the charge id in source_transaction (As per https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges-transfers)
What happens: The connected account (B) seems to get the full payment, without fees, the fees seem to be charged to account A
Could it be that it's because in test mode? The idea is to use account A to send/split a payment between other accounts (1 or more), as in a marketplace.
You'd usually simply use a Direct Charge — https://stripe.com/docs/connect/direct-charges. That's exactly how you platform A makes an API call on connected account B to facilitate a payment, and the fees are paid by B.
The link you posted is for a more advanced integration where the platform processes the payment(and therefore pays the Stripe processing fees) and then transfers money to a connected account(like a company like Lyft charging a rider, then transferring some of the money to the driver).
The idea is to use account A to send/split a payment between other accounts (1 or more), as in a marketplace
You can't use Direct Charges to split a single payment between multiple connected accounts such that they all pay the fees separately. The most you could do is make multiple separate charges — like take the card from the customer, clone it to each individual account involved, and do N separate charges (https://stripe.com/docs/connect/cloning-customers-across-accounts) on each of them. I wouldn't really recommend that since it likely leads to more declines and disputes(it's weird to have a shopping cart with 5 items from 5 sellers and get charged by the actual 5 sellers, I would expect to be charged once by the company that runs the marketplace).
If you really need to do this type of business model where you take a single payment and then split between multiple sellers then you do need to take the approach you linked to, and have the platform pay the fees, that's the only way, it's specifically discussed at https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges#types in detail.

Stripe Connect Fixed/Flat Fee based on value for Connected Accounts

I am creating a Stripe Connect marketplace which charges a fixed fee based on value of sales, e.g. up to £2500 of revenue (for a connected account in a calendar month) will incur a flat fee of £200 per month to the platform.
I have read the Stripe documentation but still quite unclear how I can achieve this using a Standard Connect account. I understand the concept behind adding a flat fee per transaction but my use case is based around the amount of revenue over a time period.
Any help is always appreciated.
it sounds like you want to keep track of the payments processed by your connected accounts in order to figure out what to charge them.
The best way to do this is probably to set up a Connect webhook and listen for events like charge.succeeded and keep a running total each month for each account.
You have a number of options for charging your accounts, but using Billing to create a subscription that you update as their revenue grows is probably the best experience. You could also use metered billing with pricing tiers based on the payments you track.
If you need to calculate historic revenue, you'd need to manually retrieve the payments and calculate the total for the month(s) you're interested in.
NOTE: For both the webhook events and the retrieval approaches you'd need to be aware of several different objects other than Charges that may affect revenue up or down, like PaymentIntents, Refunds, Disputes etc depending on the details of the connect account's integration.
Hope that helps!

Stripe payment splitting api

i need bit clarification and guidance from exports about splitting stripe payment between multiple sellers.
I am building e-commerce systen and integrated stripe as a payment method for customers and it is working fine. Now I don't want to pay to manually to my sellers registered on my platform. I want to split the payment between several accounts if possible.
Lets say my platform is charging 10% as commission to the sellers and the customer is buying to different items from 2 different seller that worth $1000 than I want to split the payment as follow internally
me $100
seller 1:$450
seller 2:$450
Any help or guidance will be appreciated thanks
Stripe as such does not provide the splitting mechanism. But using Stripe Connect you can do it.
In Stripe connect there is one main account called platform account and can have multiple secondary accounts connected to it. So in your case, your seller will connect with your platform account.
Now for every charge you can split the amount among the seller and platform using application_fee parameter in charge object.
But this method has one problem also
If the customer is purchasing from multiple sellers than you have to charge the customer many times(as no. of the seller). So in case of multiple items from different sellers I have used transfer API to transfer the amount to seller instead of multiple charging to customer
In my system, I also face the same problem and after a lot of research, I found this way working for me.

Allow users to accept payments from their users

I am working on a software that is to be used by businesses which make about $0.5mil revenue per year. I would like to incorporate into the software the option for my users to accept card payments from their clients. So far it seems I have the following options:
Manage multiple merchant accounts on behalf of my clients, however this has a few drawbacks. I would, for example, like to charge some small fee to cover the costs (about 0.1%) which I cannot accept if the payment to my user doesn't go through some stage that I can control where I can deduct the fee and send it my way. Also, about 50% of the mentioned revenue is paid for by credit or debit cards so a volume of $250,000 might not be enough to cover the fees set by the account provider.
Send everything through a merchant account that I control and then distribute the funds to the users. This, however, seems like a very small scale solution at best with the average number of payments per user per day being around 15.
The end result should be that the user enters a price in the software, this gets sent to a card reader where the user's client inserts their card and makes the payment. The amount charged includes all the fees associated. The amount paid will then be sent to some merchant account where my fee will be sent to me and the merchant fee will be deducted, the rest will be sent to my user's account. The whole point being that the user doesn't have to bother with setting up merchant account or card reader and simply gets a card reader from us which connects to the software and can immediately accept payments.
I sincerely hope I am missing something but I would appreciate any help with finding a way how to charge clients of my users and take some small fee.
So as it turns out, the best way to do this is using Stripe after all. If anyone is ever concerned, this is how I solved the problem.
Stripe is currently rolling out Managed Accounts of their Stripe Connect which can be used to effectively manage Stripe accounts for my customers. Therefore, once a user registers for my payment program, I create a managed account for them without the user knowing at all. For incoming Stripe payments I can then use the destination property as the id of the account where the money should go and specify an application fee which will be charged to my own account.
From there on the only problem to solve is that Stripe only supports online payments which can be overcome by using for example Payworks, however so far their service has been pretty terrible so this may be a weak point in the system.

Stripe vs Balanced

I'm assisting in development of a backend for a painting service that works with many contractors across the US. We've been using Stripe, but the business has been paying the contractors using their bank's ACH service add-on which takes 3-5 days and has to be done manually.
Balanced seems like it's Stripe + next-day ACH payouts with a great API, automating everything. Is this an accurate description of the service? I'm confused why you'd ever use Stripe over Balanced in that case. This is assuming it's also a merchant account + payment gateway like Stripe if I'm reading correctly.
Still wrapping my head around how to best make this work. Thanks everyone.
Stripe:
Charge cards
ACH payouts
Recurring billing
Webhooks
OAuth merchant signup
2.9% + 30¢ per charge
Holds funds for 7 days before you can pay out
Charges in USD or CAD
Balanced:
Authorize and charge cards
ACH payouts
ACH debits
Fully API driven merchant signup
Escrow account
Recurring billing
Webhooks
2.9% + 30¢ per charge, 25¢ per ACH credit (volume pricing calculator)
Funds are available immediately for payouts (vs Stripe's 7 day rolling reserve)
Charges in USD
In a nutshell the fundamental difference is that Stripe focuses on bringing money in to your account, Balanced focuses on bringing money in, holding it until an order to fulfilled, and paying out to your merchants.
You can use Stripe to collect money and Balanced to pay out easily enough, the biggest problem you'll run into is that there will be a liquidity problem as you have to transfer funds from your Stripe to Balanced before you can pay out or create a float of 7 days.
Stripe is also great if you have sub-agents or affiliates that you want to have run the sale, but where you take a percentage of the total charge as well. We recently implemented this for a cause oriented site that supports the collection of donations for smaller and more personal causes. It is one of the more interesting features of the Stripe API. Sub accounts can be created on the fly and activated via a simple email validation creating a one-stop shop for configuring online affiliate programs.
Both are good for specific things, for example balanced will let you collect money from groups in a single pot (in their escrow), and then pay it out. Stripe is good for automated billing.
Stripe is a established company that has a polished interface and support. Balanced is a fly-by-night.
I have one site with Balanced and one with Stripe Connect, and this is the defining difference.
Balanced changed their API and completely broke all transactions.
They didn't even send out an email. Never happened with Stripe.
Balanced once "held up our site for review". Our marketplace went down with no notice or email. (And no explanation when I emailed them, just a response it was being held).
balanced.js can take 10-15 seconds to load, causing the page to hang (we implemented lazy loading just for balanced, but the page is not always ready when needed).
IRC support: Balanced has ~40 inactive users and ~10 users online ATM [in the middle of the U.S. night there are no user, and the inactive users have no AI personality]. Stripe has at least 100 active users, and I seem to be able to get an answer whenever I need to.
etc.
Balanced has one killer feature - your users can sign up and start selling immediately, they don't need to validate themselves to sell, only to receive money.
They are more likely to follow through if it's easy to get into the system. But the risks are real, and should not be ignored.
Also, if it matters, the fact that Stripe can accept payments in multiple currencies can be a killer feature as well.

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