Do I have to create an Account, Merchant Account, or just a customer to Credit a Balanced Bank Account? - balanced-payments

Balanced payments documentation is unclear about debits and credits. You have merchants, customers and accounts. It now says accounts are deprecated and to use customer. Can someone shed light on any corrections I have in my workflow:
Form with CC fields tokenizes card.
Create customer for buyer and add card.
Debit buyers card.
Create another Customer object.
Add a bank account to the Second customer object.
Credit Second Customer object
Do I need the merchant fields on the second customer object (dob, postal code, etc)?
Do I need to do underwriting to second customer object?

Your workflow is correct.
The Customer resource abstracts away from you the pain the Account resource had when dealing with underwriting a merchant. Underwriting is required as part of the KYC (Know Your Customer) operation requirements Balanced needs to follow. Each Customer has an attribute named is_identity_verified where you can know if the Customer's identity was verified. Ideally you want to make sure the identity is verified for each Customer to which you will be crediting. While you can still perform credits (I believe up to a certain limit) to Customers whose identity is not verified, you run the risk of increased fraud and there may eventually be consequences to your marketplace.
Also, feel free to stop by #balanced on IRC. You'll probably get much faster answers to your questions there directly from developers.

Related

How is the correct way to pay my customers

I want to create a platform where I have 2 kinds of users, Seller and Buyer.
Let's imagine that the Seller is selling a $10 product and I need get 10% of the value to me. Which is the correct way to do that transaction? The buyer need to pay to my account and I transfer the money to the seller after that? How can I do that transaction in a secure way for me and my customers? I need use gateways like Stripe or Paypal for that?
How the majority of platforms pay me with only my bank data? In platforms like Amazon, Shpfy... I think they don't have a person that do manual transfers every day for each seller.
You need Stripe Connect that allows you to work with merchants and payout them. Let me know, if you have a question with Stripe and Stripe Connect.

Charge vs subscription with Stripe

I'm reading the document from Stripe and I have one point that is fuzzy on my side.
My customer are create in Stripe and automatically a subscription is attached to them. So in my case, each month they will be charge according to their subscription.
Now I read the documentation about the charge component and the documentation says:
To charge a credit or a debit card, you create a charge object..
Here my questions:
Do the subscription charges a customer too but each month ?
Who I can change the currency of a subscription to bill the customer in their currency ?
Thanks for your help.
Creating a subscription allows you to attach a plan to a customer so that they are billed automatically on each billing cycle (daily, monthly, etc.). On each new billing cycle an invoice is created that is then paid automatically which leads to a Charge. You can read more about this on Stripe's extensive documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/quickstart
As for the currency, you do not set it on the Customer itself. Instead the currency is associated to a Plan. You, as the developer, decide which Plan(s) to attach to a given subscription. You'd ask your customer which currency they want to pay in client-side for example.

Paypal API and automated refunds

I would like to inquire about this:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/ht_basicRefund-curl-etc/
How to initiate an automated refund based on a product ordered that is out of stock.
Example:
Customer A goes to our website and orders product A. Product A is unfortunately out of stock but we did not notice it right away(restaurant). Instead of refunding people manually, can this API refund the person automatically based on a call back from our website.
Also when a refund is given, is there a charge?(Charge back), if yes, where can I find out about the cost per charge back.
Finally, how long does it take for the refund money to reach the customer's account if the refund is initiated let's say 5 minutes after the sale.
Thank you,
Regards,
Ben
ps: I am posting the query here as I was sent to this website from the Paypal support page.
You could do this using the RefundTransaction API from within an IPN script.
A general refund is not considered a chargeback. That only happens if you refuse to provide a refund for your buyer, so then they end up filing a dispute with their credit card company. The card company would then give them the money and take it from PayPal, who would then come back to you for it. That's when you would have to pay a fee for that chargeback. If I remember correctly that fee would be $25 for such a scenario.
So the refunds wouldn't be a chargeback, but you would lose the 30 cent transaction fee you pay when you do the original transaction. PayPal refunds you the percentage they take, but not the flat 30 cents.
Also, if this is something happens a lot PayPal may limit your account or it could cause you other little problems. Lots of refunds could mean upset customers, and PayPal doesn't want that...and neither should you.
So, all of that said, what I would recommend is that you handle the inventory control before the purchase is made. You're saying you could hit your database to check inventory and then automatically refund, right? Why not hit your database to simply disable the product purchase if the inventory is low instead?

eCommerce - Multiple Bank Accounts Automated Transactions

Evening
I have a client who is asking to build an eCommerce tool in which multiple stores are able to create accounts and their products in order to sell them via a web app.
This is not like any regular eCommerce sites since we are working with multiple stores each one of them with an unique bank account.
The quick solution is to ask the stores users to give me the bank account and all extra sensitive information and do the transaction via coding my self... but i don't want to mess with such delicate data that is why im looking for some service that helps me do that.
I know that i can use auth net to build something like that but my main client will have to pay for each of those merchant accounts, which is not a very good option.
Any of you had the chance to work in something like this before? Can you tell me which services you used? Would be extraordinary to use the same payment gateway to do everything but i am probably asking for too much...
Waiting for answers, thanks in advance
You definitely don't want to be storing bank information and card data if you are not Level 1 PCI compliant. There is a lot of financial liability if you do so.
There is a company called Base Commerce (www.basecommerce.com) which allows developers such as yourself to create a 'partner' account and associate multiple merchant accounts under it. You can spin up or down as many accounts as you want, all programatically, at no cost (except for the small % transaction fees that are normal in payment processing). You will also get commissions on the transactions your merchants process.

Parallel credit card payments (akin to Paypal Adaptive payments)

I'm not sure this is the right place to ask but anyway:
I have an e-commerce platform that I want to monetize based on a percentage of revenue made (eg. a store that uses my platform has an order for $100, so I get 1% or $1, while they get $99).
Currently I offer paypal and credit card payments (via my merchant bank) to all stores on the platform (ie. all payments made, regardless of the store, are through the same paypal and merchant account). I then pay these stores per month which is ok for the moment because there are only a few stores using the platform.
Moving forward I want to automate this process and ideally have it operate in real time.
Paypal have an "Adaptive Payments" API that allows chained or parallel payments on a single transaction processed in real time. This means I can skim my 1% and pass the rest of the money along my customer in real time.
I was wondering if there is a similar real-time service for Credit Card processing*? If not, is there a bank/merchant that allow API payment access so I can automate payments per day or week? OR should I just transfer all money from my bank to paypal and use this to pay my customers?
*I realise you can process credit card payments through Paypal without having to sign up, but this is less than ideal. I want the credit card processing to happen on my page as at the moment I'm seeing about 70% of orders using this over paypal.
I was wondering if there is a similar real-time service for Credit Card processing?
No there isn't. True merchant accounts do not allow for split payments. Only one entity can receive a payment and it must be the business the merchant account has been set up for. Receiving the payment for someone else is called factoring and is against all of the major credit card issuers' rules. If a merchant account is found to be factoring it will be closed and the merchant who owns the account will be blacklist. This will prevent them from ever having a true merchant account again. Additionally, there is no way to send money with a merchant account other then issuing a refund for prior purchases.
If not, is there a bank/merchant that allow API payment access so I can automate payments per day or week? OR should I just transfer all money from my bank to paypal and use this to pay my customers?
Other then using adaptive payments, this is definitely the easiest and most straight forward way to accomplish this.