Midnight Oil

We’re currently evaluating possible payment gateways for our new project, DoLeaf. Given that it’s a marketplace app, your standard one-size-fits-all payment system just won’t work. We need to be able to transfer money from any buyer to any seller, and hopefully take a cut for ourselves in the process. With that in mind, we’re looking at both Amazon FPS and PayPal Express (via ActiveMerchant).

Here is our list of pros and cons for each solution:

PayPal Express

Pros

• Can assume that most sellers will already have a PayPal account.
• Buyers are used to using PayPal.
• Integrates with ActiveMerchant, and PayPal + AM looks fairly simple.

Cons

• High barrier of entry for sellers:
  1. Seller must sign up for PayPal Premier or Business account.
  2. Seller must create API credentials (PayPal provides a walkthrough)
  3. Seller must provide us with their credentials (cut & paste, with the possibility of typos and such)
• Credentials are quite sensitive and must be treated as such, with encryption in the database at the very least.

Amazon FPS

Pros

• CoBrand UI can be used to install recipient tokens, making setup easy for sellers.
• Tokens are transferred automatically, meaning no possibility of typos or transmission errors when seller is etting up.
• Can run all the transactions for a cart quickly and seamlessly, rather than 1-per-seller.
• Probably could set up a 1-click ordering sort of system.
• Overall fees will probably be lower since there’s only 1 transaction per sale (rather than 1 for buyer-to-seller and 1 for seller-to-us)
• Tokens are not nearly as sensitive as PayPal API credentials.

Cons

• FPS and Remit are both still kind of unstable.
• Locks us out of ActiveMerchant, unless we want to support multiple pathways.
• No convenient pre-built seller interface. We’d probably need to create an account panel for handling refunds and such.

Thoughts

Overall, I’m leaning toward PayPal at this point. ActiveMerchant and the ability to possibly integrate future payment gateways with ease is a big plus in PayPal/ActiveMerchant’s favor. In addition, people are used to using PayPal for these sorts of transactions. So, buyers in the market we’re targeting will almost certainly have a PayPal account, but not necessarily an Amazon payments account. If only there were a way to make it easier for sellers to get set up.

Anyone else go down this path and come to a different conclusion?

We’re 95% done on RioFlexPay, a front-end graphical user interface (gui) to the Amazon Flexible Payment System (FPS). We’ve got a splash page up right now, and we’re getting ready to put the production server together in anticipation of a pre-June deployment.

It’s been a tough ride, but we’re almost there! In a few short days or weeks, managing your FPS account will get much, much easier.

Stay tuned!