Build a Marketplace on Braintree

Update: Effective September 29, 2017, Braintree Marketplace is no longer available for new integrations, but we still offer other solutions for marketplace businesses. To learn more, please contact our Sales team.

Over the years Braintree has helped many companies grow by simplifying payments. We've taken what we learned working with some of the most successful marketplaces like TaskRabbit, Airbnb, and Uber to develop an easy way for marketplaces to facilitate payments between their customers and service providers.

Starting today, you can quickly build a marketplace on Braintree. We’ve added new APIs so you can payout providers, automatically deposit a portion of the transaction to yourself, as well as hold funds in escrow until they’re ready to be released. And, we’ll take care of generating tax documents you can give your providers.

Adding Providers

To use Marketplace, collect providers’ personal information in your signup experience. We’ll use the information you provide to verify the individual with third-party services. Here’s how you create a Sub Merchant Account to use when charging customers with our Ruby client library:

Braintree::MerchantAccount.create(  
  :master_merchant_account_id => "TaskRabbit",  
  :id => "cory_monty",  
  :individual => {    
    :first_name => "Cory",    
    :last_name => "Monty",    
    :email => "cory@braintreepayments.com",    
    :address => {      
      :street_address => "111 N Canal St.",      
      :postal_code => "60606",      
      :locality => "Chicago",      
      :region => "IL"    },    
      :date_of_birth => "1980-10-09"  
    },  
    :funding => {    
      :destination => Braintree::MerchantAccount::FundingDestination::Email,    
      :email => "cory@braintreepayments.com",  
    },  
    :tos_accepted => true
)  

One of the biggest sources of friction for marketplaces is collecting and managing bank account information. With Marketplace, you can payout to an email address or mobile phone number via Venmo without sending us any bank account information. Also, when you use Venmo to payout you won’t need to spend time tracking down transfer exceptions and keeping bank accounts up-to-date.

Charging Customers

Now, charge a customer and pass the provider’s Sub Merchant Account ID and Service Fee amount. Your portion, the service fee, will automatically deposit into your bank account and the remaining amount of the transaction will be paid to your provider.

Braintree::Transaction.sale(  
  :amount => "100.00",  
  :service_fee_amount => "10.00",  
  :merchant_account_id => "cory_monty",  
  :credit_card => {    
    :number => "4111111111111111",    
    :expiration_date => "12/12",  
  }
)  

Escrow Funds

We've built escrow into Marketplace so businesses can intelligently manage their exposure to fraud and chargebacks. When you park a transaction in escrow, we'll use those funds if the transaction is refunded or disputed. You can hold transactions any time before they settle by using our API.

Braintree::Transaction.hold_in_escrow("transaction_id")  

Later, when you want to release held funds, request a release and we'll disburse funds the next business day.

Braintree::Transaction.release_from_escrow("transaction_id")  

We're excited to make Marketplace available to US businesses. To get started, signup for Marketplace and read our guide available for every client library.