Overview

Our Payment API gives you the ability to set up and manage a marketplace business and to split payments for any transaction. Payments can be split between as many as 500 parties, for both one time and recurring transactions, as a percentage or a fixed amount that can be overridden for each transaction. No matter how you run your business, we provide the APIs necessary to set up and manage the vendors selling with your platform.

Terminology

The following terms appear throughout this guide:

• Marketplace Merchant: You, the marketplace owner, sometimes referred to as the Merchant of Record

  • You manage vendor onboarding, run reports, and send transactions for processing. You communicate all onboarding, payout, and reporting information to your marketplace. You are the legal entity responsible for selling goods or services to the customer.

• Vendors: The vendor provides the goods, services or platform for your business

  • Depending on your business model, the vendor will rely on the marketplace merchant as their point of contact.

Benefits

• Seamless Vendor Onboarding: Quickly board new vendors with BlueSnap to begin processing transactions immediately.

• Comprehensive Reporting: Keep track of vendor activity through our reports, which are available through both the Reporting API and Merchant Portal.

• Simple Payout: Leave the headaches of payout to us. We split the payment between you and your vendors based on the commission you define.

Splitting Payments

Finding the right solution for your business

Our marketplace functionality is designed to allow you to split payments at the time of a sale, which provides you with the opportunity to generate more revenue for your business. Each time you make a sale, you get to keep a portion of the funds. BlueSnap supports different split payments structures, so you should consider your business model as we help you determine the best solution for your business. The model you use comes down to a simple question: Are you the merchant of record for each transaction, or are you providing a platform or service that will be used by merchants to offer payments to their customers?

For example, maybe you run a ride-share service where passengers contact your company to request rides. Your team confirms their location and identifies drivers in your area to complete the ride. In this model, your company is the merchant of record and the driver providing the service is the vendor. In another example, your company may provide products for sale and have distribution channels around the globe. When an online order comes into your order management system, you locate the closest warehouse to the shopper that has the product in stock.

In both examples, your company is the merchant of record, and the other parties who helped carry out the service are considered vendors. This is a common split payments model. If your business is set up with this model, you can learn more about vendor onboarding to continue.

Split payments with Relay or Dash

In an alternative model, you have created a platform for other businesses to use. The platform might provide small businesses with a space to sell their products or services to their customers. Your company is not selling any products; you just set up the infrastructure for other businesses to create their own online space and sell to shoppers. In this model, each of the small businesses is the merchant of record and your company is the vendor who made this all possible. To facilitate this model and seamlessly onboard merchants, we recommend combining split payments with our Relay or Dash solutions.

In both cases, our marketplace functionality can accommodate your needs and allow you to split each transaction between the parties involved in each sale.

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If you want to charge a direct fee

If you want to get paid a flat/direct fee instead of splitting payments, check out our Embedded Payments solution instead. While there are many similarities between our partner solution, (Embedded Payments) and our marketplace solution, the main difference is that the marketplace solution allows you to split payments with one or more parties.

Marketplace Features

This guide covers the following marketplace fundamentals:

• Vendor Onboarding
• Vendor Verification Requirements
• Updating Vendor Accounts
• Processing Transactions
• Reporting
• Payout

Get Started: Vendor Onboarding

Let's begin by learning about how to create vendor accounts and begin the onboarding process.

➔ Vendor Onboarding