Overview

BlueSnap helps you build a marketplace business by enabling you to onboard vendors, manage marketplace relationships, split payments based on commission rate, and distribute funds to both your business and your vendors.

Marketplace Roles

There are two roles in a marketplace ecosystem: the merchant and their vendors.

Marketplace Merchant

The marketplace owner is responsible for vendor onboarding, transaction submission, and reporting as well as the communication of onboarding, payout, and reporting information. They are the Merchant of Record, the legal entity responsible for the transaction with the customer.

Vendors

A vendor provides the goods, services, or platform capabilities to the marketplace. Depending on the business model, vendors may interact primarily with the marketplace merchant.

How It Works

Use BlueSnap Marketplace when your business needs to split customer payments between your platform and one or more vendors.

In this model, your business accepts the customer payment and retains a portion of the funds. The remaining amount is allocated to the vendor(s) involved in fulfilling the product or service.

Marketplace or Embedded Payments?

Consider this question: which party is the Merchant of Record for the transaction?

• Your business is the Merchant of Record. Use Marketplace if your business is the legal seller to the customer and you need to split funds with vendors.
• Another business is the Merchant of Record. Use Embedded Payments if you provide software or services to other merchants and want to collect a direct or flat fee.

Example Use Cases

In both of these examples, the customer transacts with your business while the other participating parties are vendors.

Ride-Share Service

You run a ride-share service where customers book rides through your platform and pay your business. Your platform then assigns a driver to complete the ride. In this model:

• Your business is the Merchant of Record.
• The driver is a vendor.
• The payment can be split between your business and the driver.

Distributed Fulfillment

A customer places an order through your business. Your system routes the order to the warehouse or fulfillment partner best positioned to ship it. In this model:

• Your business is the Merchant of Record.
• The warehouse or fulfillment partner is a vendor.
• The payment can be split between your business and the fulfillment partner.

Next Steps

If you're interested in implementing Marketplace, continue with:

• Vendor Onboarding to set up your vendor accounts.
• Payments to process transactions and split funds with your vendors.