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.
Related
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.
I am working with a marketplace website. Initially, I will be charging a customer for buying a product and the money will be credited to my stripe account. After that, I want to transfer some money from my stripe account to two different standalone connected stripe accounts in. How can I achieve this using stripe?
The exact feature you are looking for is Transfer. Before April 6, 2017, transfers also represented movement of funds from a Stripe account to a card or bank account. This behaviour has since been split out into a Payout object, with corresponding payout endpoints.
This link has detailed guide of how to create Transfers.
I know this was asked long ago but I couldn't find any satisfactory or to the point answer.
You need to use the "Separate Charges & Transfers" flow described here: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges-transfers.
I also recommend that you write to Stripe's support at https://support.stripe.com/email to explain your business model and desired payment flows to make sure that it's something that Stripe can support.
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.
I am currently building a marketplace similar to airbnb/uber for the payment, where sellers would receive payment from buyers once the "service" is completed.
The payment solutions I am considering are Stripe and Braintree. Braintree offers Escrow while Stripe doesn't.
To make the transfer there are thus 2 solutions:
with Stripe : create an invoice object with the future date the service will happen/complete and run background jobs checking for that given date that will make the payment once it's happened.
with Braintree : use the Escrow functionality.
Is there a better solution in terms of security/scalability?
Scheduling the payment date is quite easy but since escrow is supposed to be the marketplace-way, is there really an advantage of using escrow?
I work at Braintree. If you have more questions about escrow or your Braintree integration, you can always get in touch with our support team.
The advantages of escrow don't have to do with technical security or scalability, though they make make your business less susceptible to chargebacks and other customer complaints, so they make make your business more secure and scalable.
With escrow, the money has already been charged ahead of time, so you don't have to worry about the charge being declined after the service has already been provided. You also don't have to worry about the person receiving the money taking it and failing to provide the service, since they only received the money once it's been completed. Together, these align incentives between the buyer and seller, making fraud much less likely.
I am using Stripe for online payments but also users can pay offline (cash or check). I want to centralize all my invoices/charges in one place (Stripe).
I am not sure if I can add offline payments (cash or check) to stripe or not. I guess I can if I created customers, invoices, charges with livemode=false for my live keys.
Is this feasible and will Stripe accept having some (customers, invoices and charges) with livemode=false and others with livemode=true?
If yes, should I fill fake credit card info or should I set it as nil?
Stripe does not allow you to create a Subscription on a Customer if you don't have a credit card setup. More accurately, it does not allow you to create a subscription if a customer does not have a way to pay for the next invoice. So for offline payments, you could update the 'account_balance' on the customer to have a negative value equal to the amount the customer wired (credits). Stripe will then allow you to create a subscription for the customer because it knows that the customer has enough account balance to pay for the next invoice. This post has more details.
We don't currently support offline payments, so you'll want to look at a separate accounting system for those payments.
That said, it's totally understandable that you'd want to keep this data in one place. You might be interested in using our webhooks system to offer live updates to your accounting system without directly touching the code that creates the charge in Stripe.