Marketplace payment processor

Question

I'm building a marketplace application:

• The customer pays the seller on the marketplace
• The marketplace takes a cut of the payment

I would have a payment processing system with the following features

• The cut and the 100%-cut are sent directly to the marketplace and seller accounts (ie, I don't want to have 100% on the marketplace account and then to forward the 100%-cut to the seller)
• I would love to have a UI as much integrated with the marketplace website as possible. This implies that the customer in the worst case has to put only name, surname and credit card number on the payment processor interface (the ideal would be a payment interface totally integrated with our website)
• I don't want to force the customer to register to any third party service
• It should work nicely with Ruby on Rails
• It should work for non US-based companies and should support multicurrency payments

What are the options out there?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'd recommend you look at our product Balanced. It's built to solve exactly this problem so I think it's a good match.

At a high level payments in are done via credit card like a normal payment processor, funds are deposited into an escrow account which is a sum of all funds collected - all funds disbursed. When you're ready to push funds out you can currently pay out via next-day ACH (US only) but we're building out international support which sounds like it would be useful for you.

I believe it matches your other requirements:

• there is no requirement to send users offsite, they do require accounts but you can create and edit them via the API.
• Balanced has an excellent ruby gem
• You can split up the payment, taking a cut from the proceeds as profit
• Balanced provides you with a merchant dashboard for you and your customers to get a head start but you can build the exact same thing via API access.

One area where it's not going to meet your requirements is multi-currency charges. Currently you'll need to charge in USD and convert.

Answer 2

Check out https://github.com/drhenner/ror_ecommerce It doesn't have all the features you want but will give you a big head start.

Basically active merchant will connect to most gateways. You need to add the custom code. Look at the video for more help http://ror-e.com/info/videos/1