pay with Balanced Payments

[chadwhitacre]

The payments platform for online marketplaces

PoundPay is the best way for buyers to pay sellers on their favorite marketplaces.

https://www.poundpay.com/

Integrate a payments experience just like Amazon for your marketplace. Forget about dealing with banking systems, compliance, fraud, and security.

https://www.balancedpayments.com/

See also #67.

[frankwiles]

Jacob Kaplan-Moss alerted me to your issues with collecting credit card payments. Having a bunch of experience in this area, it seems PoundPay's balance payments is absolutely the way to go. Sure the take rate is high, but the hassle is higher. I would expect at least 6+ months to get a merchant account that would let you take payments for others, would likely require a vast amount of insurance on your part, and honestly is very unlikely that they would let you have it in any case.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks, @jacobian and @frankwiles. Will look seriously at PoundPay. Having been burned by a start-up (#58), I'm hesitant to put all my eggs in a basket with only 15 Twitter followers. But maybe they're part of the solution.

[frankwiles]

Definitely understandable! Best of luck!

[chadwhitacre]

Thank you. :-)

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Frank Wiles <
[email protected]

wrote:

Definitely understandable! Best of luck!

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/78#issuecomment-6556510

[timothyfcook]

Let's hope they're putting their effort into product development instead of marketing. @PoundPay has 68 followers, so...

[chadwhitacre]

2.9% + 30c for charges/$0.25 for payouts. We'll put up a pricing link soon

https://twitter.com/balancedpayment/status/217338924396318720

Same problem as Stripe Platform (#58) unless we can batch somehow. Need to explore their API.

[chadwhitacre]

"We don't really optimize for micro-transactions right now, but shoot me an email and I can tell you some stuff we have planned." (via Twitter)

So this isn't a medium-term solution.

[timothyfcook]

nothing is optimized for micro-transactions… except Dwolla.

On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:59 PM, Chad Whitacre wrote:

"We don't really optimize for micro-transactions right now, but shoot me an email and I can tell you some stuff we have planned." (viw Twitter)

So this isn't a medium-term solution.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/78#issuecomment-6557986

[chadwhitacre]

Said email:

We don't really optimize for micropayments, but we might be able to offer you some functionality that's interesting. I'll leave it up to you to determine that:

1. pre-authorize a card for $10 and charge it once later for a batch of payments that are equal to or less than the pre-auth amount. This might cut down on the per-transaction flat fee
2. charge the buyer's card $10 and let them use that amount to pay merchants in 35¢ increments
3. we're developing a way to charge a buyer's bank account directly, bypassing the credit card fees. This is a few months away, but I figured I'd let you know now

(2) sounds like what we're doing now. I don't like how green they are relative to Braintree. First-class marketplace merchant account appeals to me more than this.

[chadwhitacre]

More info here: http://sync.in/gittip-balanced

[chadwhitacre]

See #137 for an implementation of this from @mjallday.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm calling this done. I've ticketed deployment as #172 and migration of data from Stripe as #174.

Thanks, @mjallday and Balanced! :D