Split Payment Utility in Marketplace Software

Split Payment Advantages for Businesses

In addition to split shipment abilities, split payments are critical for specific businesses and specific situations.

Oftentimes with a buyer group and/or marketplace, there may be multiple purchasers of the items that are in the cart, and they may need to individually account for making the payment for their portion of the purchase. Therefore, being able to operate with split payments is fundamentally critical for any business.

For example, there may be a situation where an organization needs to purchase a very expensive item and there needs to be an upfront, earnest payment. After that, there could be monthly payments via subscription or renewing payment option. Therefore, we would want to split out the upfront payment from the subscription payment information.

It's also pretty common to have a situation where if we're processing a credit card payment and the amount of the purchase is greater than the credit card’s daily limit, we need to split out the payment across multiple cards.

For instance, a client might have a certain account balance or credit, and the amount there doesn’t cover the full price of the product. So, the client would split the payment such that the account credit would be used, and the rest of the price would be covered via credit card or wire, etc. So here again, you can see how the ability to split out the payment is vital for the customer to make the purchase.

In addition to splitting out the payments for just to be able to make limits and meet limits, it also is common to break out payments based on different locations for billing and analytical accounting within a particular company.

Many companies have very granular accounting per location. If there's a corporate purchasing agent who is buying things for multiple locations, and if we need to track granularly what the expenses are per location, it can make a lot of sense to have different segments or subaccounts or payment information that's used in order to process a check out, even though it's all for the same company.

Working with Special Forms of Payment

Another common scenario for split payment is using specific forms of payment, such as gift cards, and if the gift card only covers a certain portion of the overall payment that’s due. Again, split payment would be necessary to allow the buyer to use what’s in their gift card amount and then cover the rest with another form of payment, so they can still buy the item and use their gift card money.

Furthermore, it can be quite common to use with crypto with crypto based purchases, where again maybe the crypto portion of the payment doesn't cover the entire amount, but it covers a good portion of it. So that's another situation where splitting the payment makes sense.

Generally speaking, with gift cards or crypto payments, it also makes sense to show on the screen to the user what the amount is that's available or what the with the gift card, and then what the conversion rate is on the crypto that's being used for the purchase.

Whenever purchasers are making a purchase in a marketplace, they are most likely purchasing from different vendors for different items. For drop shipping, the payment may get split out even though the shipment might go to a single location. Also, the payment may be split behind the scenes to go to the different vendors or sellers.

It’s “behind the scenes” because the customer just sees the items lumped together for one sum payment in their cart checkout, but those payments are actually being split out and sent to the different vendors the items are from.

In some marketplaces, for the sellers and group buying as well, we’ll send them payments immediately in an automated way via the eCommerce application. In these circumstances, we really need to represent this idea of splitting out the payments behind the scenes as well.

What that looks like depends on the payment provider, and we can have different payment providers per vendor where transactions are processed per payment per vendor. But usually what happens is we’ll work with the payment provider for the overall marketplace or buying group’s organization, and through their API’s we can send payments to the vendors with the correct amounts based on the schedule or an automated job that’s running.

This way, they can receive payments right away, nightly, weekly, monthly, or whatever option they choose, and we can essentially have this reconciliation process to process those payments to all the vendors.

It’s also crucial within a marketplace in general to allow the different vendors to have different payment processing information. In some marketplaces, it makes sense to allow the vendors to put their payment information in and have some verification process to they can confirm that everything is working as expected and effectively. This enables the vendors to receive the payments directly.

Oftentimes, franchises have different locations or regions that need to use a different payment provider. This may be because the corporate region or country’s payment writer doesn’t exist in this other region or country. In order to process payments, then, they must have a payment provider that does work for that region. So we do allow for purchasing items from different locations and dynamically changing the payment provider. This concept applies to split payments because this would technically be changing the payment information based on location where is the item is actually being purchased.

Split payments can be quite complicated, but fundamentally the idea is to make it much easier for the user. Therefore, it's really important that you work with a partner who has done all of the different various split payment methods and is comfortable presenting options for the best UI and UX experiences so that when a user is actually going to work with this interface, it's very intuitive and it's self-explanatory in nature.

Additional Resources for e-Marketplace

• Key Marketplace Considerations
• Filtering and Categorization of Products
• Content Sourcing Practices & Workflows
• Best Buyer Dashboard Features
• B2B Marketplace Software
• Best Cart Features & Workflows
• Best Checkout Workflows & Payment Methods
• Establishing an eMarket - Vendor Portals
• eMarket Success - Vendor Portals
• B2B Payment Gateway
• SaaS Marketplace Platform
• Split Shipping
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals
• Marketplace Advertising Best Practices – Vendor Portals
• B2B Marketplace Platform
• Key Aspects of Split Shipment for eCommerce Marketplace Management
• Split Payment Utility in Marketplace Software