[dylandrop]

IMO, neither really are as great as they should be yet. That being said, I'm using Stripe. Switching over from Paypal, this is what I have to say:

-The process to make charges from a sellers account seems to need an unnecessary amount of requests

-Why can't we pay out to multiple sellers at once like Paypal can?

-At least in Stripe, it seems kind of silly I have to refresh a credit card token each time I want to make a new charge

[cristinacordova]

(I work at Stripe)

If you're looking to split payments to multiple parties, you may want to take a look at sending transfers, rather than using Connect: https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe

This only requires the sellers' bank account information in order to pay them out.

Stripe provides a Customer abstraction that makes it easy to save credit card information for later and use it multiple times. Instead of charging the card immediately, you can create a new Customer object and save the card to that customer. See more here: https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges#saving-credit-card...

[dylandrop]

Transfers still only send to one recipient at a time, no? At least, this is how the documentation reads (recipient_id is taken as a parameter as opposed to recipient_id<s>). Also, my problem is that you need to send a different request for each payout, when many times (i.e. shopping carts) you'd want to send every charge in one request.

[cristinacordova]

You mentioned the use case of shopping carts with our API for charging and transfers. I'm assuming you have a use case of a customer making a purchase from several different sellers and then needing to pay those sellers out after the transaction?

Let's a say a customer bought $100 worth of items from two different sellers. You owe the sellers $40 each and you want to keep the rest. Here's how you'd handle that:

1) Charge the card (https://stripe.com/docs/api#charges) the full amount of the purchase ($100). 2) Subtracting Stripe's fees, you'd see $96.80 appear in your Stripe balance (https://stripe.com/docs/api#balance). 3) Initiate a transfer to seller 1 (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers) for $40 (this costs $0.25) 4) Initiate a transfer to seller 2 (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers) for $40 (this costs $0.25). 5) You'll have $16.30 remaining in your balance. You can then transfer that to your own bank account (https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers) and we don't charge any fees for paying yourself out.

[dylandrop]

I think I might need to clarify the issue -- the problem isn't that you can't pay out to multiple people, it's that you have to pay out to each person with a separate call to the API.

In order to pay out to two separate people, you'd need to make 2 POST requests to transfers#create (at least as far as I can find in Stripe's documentation). I feel like instead of one transfer at a time, it should be both transfers at once. Say you have a cart with 5 items in it. That means 5 separate POST requests, when this seems kind of unnecessary -- why not send them and process them all at once? PayPal supports this behavior, so why not Stripe?

In other words, a request might look like

{ charges: [ {seller_id: 12, amount: 400}, {seller_id: 13, amount: 400}, {seller_id: 14, amount: 400}, {seller_id: 15, amount: 400} ] card_number: 1283123412341234 ... }

[jareau]

We (Balanced) are discussing this issue of mass payouts via CSV upload on a Github thread here: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard/issues/21#iss...

dylandrop's already commented, but would love to get others' input

[heynk]

You can save credit card information and use it multiple times:

https://support.stripe.com/questions/can-i-save-a-card-and-c...

[jonathancordeau]

If I were you, I'd go directly to the source: @cjc (stripe) and @jkwade (balanced) It seems like you would be served well by both companies, so you should definitely share your specifics and see which one is the best fit.

[jareau]

@dylandrop , happy to hear feedback or make recommendations on how to best use Balanced

[cristinacordova]

I just shot Dylan an email -- thanks for the recommendation.