I'm new to Balanced and was wondering if you could define what exactly an Escrow Account is, and what is the difference between that balance and the Marketplace Merchant balance?
If I am the Marketplace owner person/organization, which represents me? Also, in what cases would my account have a negative balance?
Some basic terminology: In Balanced users are represented by Accounts. Accounts can have two roles; the buyer (users who can be debited), and the merchant role (users who can be credited). Finally there's you, the marketplace, who manages the transaction.
Now, to answer your questions regarding escrow and owner accounts and where fees come from etc:
Transactions generally flow like this (diagram):
buyer --> hold (authorization) --> debit --> marketplace escrow --> credit --> merchant
The escrow balance amount is the sum of all debits minus the sum of all credits. This balance can never go below zero.
The marketplace balance is the sum of all credits to your owner account minus the sum of fees Balanced charges for each transaction. This can go below zero as Balanced charges fees to this account at the time of the transaction. Balanced settles these fees e.g. deducts monies from owner bank account every 7 days.
Note All fees are drawn from your marketplace owner account, not the escrow balance.
Related
I'm launching a marketplace where some professionals offer their services and customers can book and pay them online. I take percentage fees in the process and I use stripe direct charges for that. So when a customer proceed to a stripe payment though my website the professional (the connected account) gets paid and automatically pays me (the platform account) the application fees percentage that I set.
I've searched on stripe website and couldn't find an answer: Is it possible to generate automatically some invoices from my platform account to the connected account that would be related to the application fees ?
For example if the professional's price is 10$ and the application fees that I set is 10% how could I generate the 1$ invoice to the professional ?
I only found how to build or generate invoices for connected account to their customers but not invoices involving the platform account and the connected account.
It seems like what you are looking for is an application_fee[1] . As the diagram[2] displays, the professional (Connected account) charges the customer directly but your application fee is collected and deposited in your account during the funds flow of the Connected account.
This does not provide any invoice to the professional since the application_fee is sent to your account at the same time as the remaining funds are transferred to the Connected account. This process allows you to have a set percentage based application fee you charge the professionals on your marketplace.
The application_fee approach is the recommended way of collection a fee as part of a direct charge. This will not generate an invoice to your Connected accounts automatically but you could always generate one of your own (outside of Stripe) as a record of the fee for those accounts.
https://stripe.com/docs/connect/direct-charges#collecting-fees
https://stripe.com/docs/connect/direct-charges#flow-of-funds-with-fees
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.
Is it possible to transfer from the customer account to our own account?
Note: This is not a fee of transaction, but it's simply withdrawing from customer's account.
Here is a scenario: We introduce a user to the shopping center. Then the user pays in the shopping center (physically and not online payment). Then we get the invoices from the shopping center and at the end of the month, we should transfer some money from the shopping center. So, no online transaction, no fee. Just simply transferring money from the user's account to our account. (maybe there should be verification process from the shopping center, which is ok)
You'll need to decide how to model the relationship you have with the Shopping Center and the Shopper with Stripe, but one suggestion would be to consider the Shopping Center as your Customer, who then pays you based on referred Shoppers etc. This could be done many different ways, using Invoices, or saved payment methods and off-session payments, or with a usage-based Subscription.
Alternatively, if you were facilitating payments from Shoppers to the Shopping Centers, you might use Connect and set up the Shopping Centers as Connected Accounts and the Shoppers as Customers. You would collect application fees for the payments you facilitate online. For offline payments, you could charge your connected accounts fees using account debits.
I've read all the documentation on this I could find (maybe there is more?) and I'm still unclear on the $2 fee per active account per month.
If I am building a peer to peer e-commerce platform, let's say there are 100 active user accounts.
Of those 100, 10 active accounts sell goods and 90 active accounts are only purchasers of goods from those 10 sellers.
Would the $2 fee be for only the accounts that are selling? Or all 100? This would be a significant monthly cost difference at $20/month vs $200/month.
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Would the $2 fee be for only the accounts that are selling? Or all 100?
Stripe has multiple products, what you are asking about is the seller side. (https://stripe.com/en-nl/connect)
Connect accounts allow you to manage your sellers - onboard them, verify them (fradulent?), transfer funds to their connected accounts and pay them out.
If you want to integrate payments, you will also need Stripe Payments - https://stripe.com/en-nl/payments
Payments are usually charged per transaction, so I would do some forecast of potential traffic.
Their pricing also depends on the countries you are buying/selling in so I would definitely recommend to check with their sales team and get a quota. They are really helpful and professional.
Maybe a list of useful heads up questions:
Does your platform operates in one country or there is a plan to expand?
What is the average price of goods that are traded (if you take payment cost - is it worth it)?
Are your sellers risky?
Are your buyers risky?
What kind of payment methods will your buyers use?
Do you think your sellers want customized onboarding experience? Can you justify additional cost of onboarding?
No need to share responses, but prepare yourself if you plan to negotiate contract.
I hope this is helpful!
According to the documentation Google Wallet seems to only support monthly recurring subscriptions.
I'd to charge users annually for the use of an application hosted on AppEngine (purely to be able to offer the user a better price and reduce administrative costs). Are there any plans to support annually recurring subscriptions?
Or is there a way to configure the current subscription system to behave as an annual subscription system?
Technically there's no way to configure an annual subscription. But I suppose you can work around it: Request an initial payment for the entire first year and then a monthly-recurring payment at a discount.
For example, suppose you offer a monthly plan that costs $100. And you want to offer an annual plan for $900 (25% discount). Instead, you may offer an initial payment of $900 followed by 36 monthly-recurring payments of $75.
What this means for your business is that once a user has paid for and used your service for an entire year then you start treating her as a "loyal customer" and let her keep paying the discount price without committing for another year.
Wallet for Digital Goods currently only supports a monthly frequency for subscriptions.
https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/digital/docs/jsreference#jwt
there is no official solution for an annual subscription, but you could implement a solution similar to what #oferei or #EdSF suggested in their posts.