Payee transactions

From Barion Documentation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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 sum of all payee transactions must not exceed the total amount of the corresponding payment transaction. 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 registered, active Barion user.

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
  5. The money is instantly transferred to the contributor and is available to use

Note: Payee transactions ALWAYS take place between the merchant and the contributor. 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. The payee transaction shows up in both the merchant's and the contributor's transaction history.

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. The payee transaction shows up in both the merchant's and the contributor's transaction history, but not in the facilitator's.