Payment solution for b2b website

[dcau]

We are developing a b2b website which connect buyers and manufacturers (sellers) of a certain product.

The seller has the ability to list their product on our site and the buyer to search for these products and purchase them.

Each product offering listed on the site is custom manufactured and has an expiry date by which it has to be bought and manufactured. If a buyer does not purchase the product by this date the listing expires.

We plan to allow the seller to collect 0-100% of the product sale price upfront as a booking fee to secure the manufacturing of the product.

We will charge a fee to the seller to list their product on the website.

Hence there are 2 possible financial transactions through the website;
1. the listing fee the seller pays to us
2. the booking fee (if one is set by the seller) the buyer pays to the seller to secure the manufacturing of the product - ideally this would go directly from the buyer to the seller

What payment solution(s) would you suggest for such a service?

[dwatrous]

That sounds like a rather complicated billing model, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. However, have you thought about an eBay type model. Let people list there stuff and others book it. When the sale takes place you just take a percentage? That might be an easier model that you could manage more directly with a normal gateway and payment processor.

Just a thought.
Daniel

[skytopdesigns]

the booking fee sounds like a straight forward fee system, then mabey pay pal would work, but i dont know if pay pal can handle a more custome type set up. look into the more popular check out gateways or mabey a custom paymet gateway

[marc77]

Do you want to charge the booking fee on behalf of the seller or just act as the binding element between the buyer and the seller ?

If you are going to provide some kind of escrow service (trust service), you must take care about the legal responsibilities in your country.

Depending upon that, such service could be rated as "financial service" which requires a special registration of your business (e.g. in Germany/European Union you would need to obtain a banking license).

[willanfei]

Yes, I think paypal is great, particularly for some international b2b service providing site, and my company do use paypal for international money transfer.