#braydensterrett

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

mighty gulchBOT
pastel cloud
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Happy to help, what are you running in to?

ashen sage
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The question is less of a technical implementation question.. but I'm basically trying to understand the best way to be able to charge someone without needing confirmation of the payment.

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The situation (so you don't think we're being shady lol) is we're providing an authentication service for goods being sold on a marketplace. If a seller provides us a bad item, we have to have some way to charge the seller a fee for the service being provided.

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I'm a bit worried that if we allow credit cards to be the method for charging the customer, that we'll run into issues when we need to collect these fees

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Our sellers are generally not going to be super happy about that charge, but we need a way to ensure that we can collect the funds regardless of their sentiment.

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Is there a good way to support this? Would it be to only allow, say, debit cards to be used? Or going with strictly bank accounts?

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Is there something we can do up front to ensure that the payment method on file is going to be chargeable off-session at a later date without issue?

pastel cloud
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Quick question: are you a connect platform in this scenario (are you paying out money to these sellers through Stripe)? Or are you only charging them?

ashen sage
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Yes, we're paying out via connect as well.

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It was my understanding that we could really only use connect to payout to sellers

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Adding them as customers and adding a payment method on file was the way to be able to charge them if they behaved badly within our marketplace

pastel cloud
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Gotcha, just trying to understand your options. Connect actually gives you a couple of options here on top of charging the users as customers. To quickly cover those:

  1. If you are using Express or Custom connect, you can debit the account's payout account directly https://stripe.com/docs/connect/account-debits
  2. You can withold sending funds to your connected accounts until you have verified the item is good
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Charging them can also work. The only way you can completely ensure you will be able to collect funds would be by placing a hold on the seller's payment method. Otherwise there is always a chance that you will set up a PM but the funds won't be available later (this isn't always malicious, I'm sure we've all overdrafted accidentally at some point). You can use things like Radar to try to weed out fraudsters as well.

ashen sage
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Okay #1 is probably an option we could take a look at.. we will be withholding the funds from the seller until verification (and they'll be paying this same fee, just wrapped inside of our cut on the item sold). It's mainly when they provide us an item that isn't what was described and we can no longer sell the item. Since we won't be receiving the funds from the buyer to cover the associated fees, we need to be able to collect them from the seller and then give them their item back.

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On option #1, does that account debit help us in avoiding confirmations from the seller's bank?

pastel cloud
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What do you mean by "confirmations" here? Account debit could actually have the same problem of charging a user's card when they don't have the proper amount of funds. It is an unfortunately but necessary risk in a lot of scenarios

ashen sage
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As well, does the connected account's Stripe balance need to have money to cover the debit we're trying to make? Or could they have a zero balance and then we'd be able to collect our $50 or whatever we are trying to charge?

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In this scenario you could assume that the seller's actual bank account had sufficient funds, but their stripe account does not ☝️

pastel cloud
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The doc that I linked to says we support debiting the bank account in certain countries. Looking in to what countries we support it in...

If a connected account has a negative balance, Stripe might auto debit the external account on file, depending on what country the connected account is in.

ashen sage
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These will all be US sellers

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I haven't had a chance to dive in to that doc quite yet, but will take some time to check it out when we wrap.

pastel cloud
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Should be supported in US

ashen sage
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In this scenario, we might still have trouble collecting if the connected external account has insufficient funds though?

pastel cloud
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Correct

ashen sage
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Okay, understood. Thanks for the info here, I think it's given me what I need!

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I see that this link says ach-deprecated but it's linked in the guide that you sent for debiting accounts. If we're signing connect accounts up via the hosted Stripe onboarding forms, is this something that we need to consider implementing?

pastel cloud
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If you are using the onboarding form, Stripe is taking care of the objects that are created behind the scenes. You won't need that deprecated doc, you can just make the charge as shown in the debitting doc that I linked to where you are only specifying the connected account ID

  amount: 1500,
  currency: 'usd',
  source: 'acct_1234',
});```
ashen sage
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Okay, that's good news. No need to use Plaid or anything to verify the account

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Last question and I'll let you go. Really appreciate your time.

Is there a way we can fund our platform account in test mode to simulate payouts and charges on these connected accounts?

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Like can I put 100k into our platform account in test mode and then start making transfers from it/charging connected accounts like we've been talking about?

pastel cloud
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Pending balance will become available within a couple days but using those test cards makes the balance appear instantly

ashen sage
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great, thanks!