Payments for marketplaces

A typical marketplace platform serves as a digital intermediary, connecting buyers and sellers who want to exchange goods or services. They provide the infrastructure without directly owning inventory themselves. Airwallex’s solutions are applicable to the marketplace business model within a number of industries, such as retail, resale, but also services and digital goods marketplaces (e.g., freelancer platforms, gig economy), travel, and more.

With the exponential growth of global trade and cross-border eCommerce specifically, most marketplace platforms operate in multiple countries and facilitate cross-border transactions. As a result, they have a need to streamline the payment complexities of international expansion via a financial infrastructure partner.

Airwallex’s Payments for Platforms solution addresses this need by making cross-border online payment acceptance easy, reducing FX conversion costs, and seamlessly paying out to sellers. With broad geographical coverage, platforms can swiftly enter new markets and monetize sellers. The solution ensures reliable and timely payments, offers low-cost and high-speed transactions through a localized payment rail network that Airwallex has built over time.

For marketplaces outside of Europe, looking for a light solution at launch, Airwallex’s recommendation is to implement a seller ledger, which conducts light screening on sellers at the point of the ledger creation, enabling uninterrupted payouts and clearing of any sanctions / AML hits. This is a lighter solution than doing a full KYC and business verification of each seller. With the ledger solution, sellers do not receive financial services from Airwallex. The ledger is provided for the marketplace’s benefit to track seller balances with Airwallex.

Key features

• The marketplace will be onboarded as the master platform account, owning each payment and is responsible for payment fees, disputes, and subsequent transactions such as captures, refunds, etc.
• Marketplaces can create ledgers for their sellers to manage seller balances before payouts.
• Airwallex only performs KYC on the platform, not the seller.
• Platform / marketplace handles fees and costs, disputes, and reserve requirement.

The solution implementation for marketplaces with ledger comprises three simple steps:

1. Create a seller ledger.
2. Deposit buyer's funds into the seller ledger.
3. Pay out from the ledger.

For implementation details, see Implement your marketplace solution.