Payee transactions

Payee transactions - agents, contributors and royalties

In certain business cases, the owner of the payment may wish to re-distribute the incoming money among third parties. Consider scenarios like buying digital music, where a certain percentage of all purchases would go to the record label, the publisher or any other copyright holder. This is where the so-called payee transactions come in handy. Using these give the merchant the ability to re-distribute the incoming amount upon recepit among one or more third parties, the so-called contributors. The whole mechanism is hidden from all contributors and even the purchaser, they do not know about each other.

Setting up payee transactions

When calling the /Payment/Start endpoint, each Payment transaction can contain an array of Payee transactions. The merchant can specify a recipient and a transaction comment for each payee transaction that is sent to the contributor. This is to aid the recipient in identifying the cause of the transaction.

Note: the recipient must be a valid e-mail address, but it isn't necessary to be a registered Barion user. In order to claim the money, they have to register themselves a Barion wallet though.

The process

1. The transaction gets prepared via the /Payment/Start API endpoint, specifying the optional payee transactions
2. The purchaser completes the payment
3. The Barion system deducts the fees (if applicable) and the paid amount is transferred to the merchant
4. The payee transactions are processed by the Barion system and the merchant automatically sends the money to each contributor via simple money transfer, with the provided comments
   • If the recipient already registered a Barion wallet, the money is instantly transferred to them and is available to use
   • If the recipient did not register a Barion wallet yet, they have 7 days to register and claim the amount - if they don't register, the amount is automatically sent back to the merchant

Note: Payee transactions ALWAYS take place between the merchant and the contributor. Unclaimed amounts always go back to the merchant, wether the user paid directly to the merchant or via a facilitator. Payee transactions show up in both the merchant's and the contributor's transaction history.

Direct payment to the shop

The customer pays directly to the merchant. The Barion system is deducting fees from the merchant, but, of course, this is not affecting the amount the merchant receives. Upon receiving the amount, the merchant sends the contributors the respective amount as separate payee transactions. Neither the customer nor the contributors are aware of each other.

Facilitated payment in a sharing economy scenario

In this case, the facilitator prepares all payment transactions, with their respective payee transactions. The customer pays directly to the facilitator. The Barion system deducts fees from the facilitator, and the facilitator themselves can also deduct fees from the merchants. The merchants receive the remaining amount, of which they send their respective contributors the money as separate payee transactions. The customer and the contributors are not aware of each other, however, a given merchant is aware of all their contributors, despite the payment being prepared by the facilitator.