I am currently in the market looking for a way to accept payments from customers; however I have run into problems, especially with Paypal. Basically I want to have payment system set up like Campusbooks.com or Textbookx.com. I will have a marketplace for various items. The buyer will buy a item and the money will go into my account; after the book is delivered and confirmed delivered I will later send the money to the seller minus the listing fees. Is there a service that will allow me to do this? If so could you give me a brief overview? If not do you know what I may need to look for in order to do this like the above mentioned sites? I was also thinking I could use paypal website standard and just send money when confirmation is done? IS this against their policy? Would a escrow system be better? PLease help I have been thinking about Google checkout? Any good?? Thanks you.
What you are suggesting is called aggregating, or factoring and is pretty much against every regulation for Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and anyone other processor. You cannot accept payment for another company or person. It is possible to sign up for an aggregating merchant account however, it is extremely expensive, and is rarely worth the cost for a new business. Generally the easiest way to get around something like this is to have a marketplace where you get commission on each sale. Your vendors would need to maintain some sort of account or balance with you which you collect your commission from. They would however need to have a means of collecting payment from the purchaser. You can provide the system that they can integrate with that allows them to collect payment, but you can't collect payment and then later pay them. The reason that aggregating is illegal is that it is a huge avenue for fraud and money laundering. There also is question as to who is liable for the transaction in the case that it is charged back or disputed.
Thanks for the great reply, I was afraid of that, I am a little confused however on the 2nd paragraph. Could you point me in the direction of a service or script or something that will do this? I will basically just collect a small service fee when the buyer buys the item from the seller. I just need something that will protect me from buyers paying and not getting the item; as well as; protecting the seller from sending the item and never receiving the money in a escrow situation. Do you or anyone else have a way I could do this? I am still developing the site so I can still integrate a system. Thanks again
You could make a separate auction site and just take a transaction fee or if you don't want to make one charge a membership fee once a month on a subscription basis.
when you say an auction site, do you mean just make it so when the person pays for the item it automatically pulls my fee from them and then deliver the rest to the seller? Do you think a escrow system would be good? I would like something to work for paypal and googlecheckout right now