[patio11]

Amazon Payments was created for this use case. I would suggest thinking long and hard about doing this as a poor college student, though: this business model will complicate everything you do, and for a first business you have plenty of things to worry about without the extra complications.

[cscotta]

Strong second.

You would have a very difficult time establishing a proper merchant account as the fraud risks are incredibly high. While many might be willing to discuss it, it is unlikely that the account would be approved by the processor's sponsoring bank in the underwriting phase.

Amazon's FPS service, while far from ideal in that it requires all parties have Amazon accounts, and requires the transaction occur off-site in Amazon's payflow, is very well-suited to this use case. It's the only quick, affordable, easy to integrate service I can think of that allows for a merchant to broker transactions between two parties (while skimming a percentage).

If you push forward with this, I'd definitely recommend launching with FPS rather than plunking down a large personal guarantee with Authorize.net or Braintree.

Good luck!

[barmstrong]

I attempted something similar in the past.

Quick summary of my experience:

1. Billing credit cards is easy, paying people through an API using direct deposit is pretty hard to find

2. Lots of companies won't know what you're talking about. The ones who do will say you are an "aggregator" and high risk.

3. BrainTree payment solution is a possible exception to this. They "get it" but they also have rejected everyone I know who has applied. They rejected my app also. You need a mil in sales and a track record.

4. I finally stumbled upon AchDirect.com. They are a two-bit no-name processor in Texas, but they approved my app, and give you an API to do direct deposit. Their customer service was incompetent, documentation was sub-bar, and generally didn't seem like they knew what they were doing. But i did finally get the thing to work.

I had to write a custom ActiveMerchant plugin for AchDirect (if you want the code get in touch with me).

I think WePay is using AchDirect too (not sure).

Anyway, Amazon FPS is much simpler. But your customers experience is much worse. It confuses people because they don't think of Amazon like they do Paypal. And (at least when I tested it) there were too many screens to go through to complete a simple transaction.

Anyway, that was my experience.

[jmathai]

I pretty much agree with everything this user said. We were rejected by BrainTree as well. We didn't want to use Amazon because the user experience wouldn't have been all that great. Requiring users to go offsite and have an Amazon account was a deal breaker for us.

We did find a merchant that worked with us. Contact me via email (jaisen(at)textbookrevolt.com) and I can get you in touch with the account rep we worked with.

[dan_manges]

I'm unsure of the specifics of your business, but we (Braintree) posted above about risk assessment generally. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494102

[barmstrong]

Cool to see BrainTree participating here. Thanks!

[djb_hackernews]

Do you think the niche is big enough to support an achdirect.com competitor?

[barmstrong]

Definitely, they are sucking it up big time.

[grasshoper]

Thanks, guys! I don't know why I hadn't even seriously considered Amazon for this. FPS Marketplace seems to have all the pieces I'm looking for. It does seem to involve a few more steps than Paypal. barmstrong's point about people not thinking of Amazon as a third-party payment service also seems valid.

Thanks for pointing me to Amazon though. I'll look into it some more.