Navigation:

Marketplaces

If you have a marketplace where sellers offer their products to customers, then you can accept payments online through Viva Wallet.

Using the Viva Wallet marketplace solution, customer payments are processed by Viva Wallet, which are in turn paid to the marketplace owner and the sellers through an escrow account. It is a great solution for marketplace owners who need an efficient way to handle commission fees and seller payouts, while offering a multitude of payment methods and additional features to their customers.

Overview

The Viva Wallet marketplace solution comprises four elements:

Escrow account: a ‘holding’ account between sellers and marketplace owner; this is the account where the funds from customer purchases will initially be paid into.
Marketplace account: the account of the marketplace owner; this is the account where the commission fees will be paid into.
Seller accounts: the accounts of the sellers; these are the accounts where the seller payouts will be paid into.
Customer: the one making the purchases.

Process flow

With the Viva Wallet marketplace solution you can:

Accept payments from customers who can purchase items from different sellers and include them all in one order; the customer payments are processed by Viva Wallet and held in escrow.
Transfer the payouts from the escrow account to the seller accounts.
Transfer the commission fees from the escrow account to the marketplace account.

Marketplace

Setup guide

To use the Viva Wallet marketplace solution you need to:

Onboard marketplace owners and sellers

Prior to the below steps, we strongly recommend that you (the marketplace owner) initially set up and test payment flows between a test escrow account and a test seller account in the demo environment, in order to make sure that the payout and refund flows are functioning properly before moving further with the implementation of a fully-fledged marketplace. Thus, you (the marketplace owner) should initially open two demo Viva Wallet accounts; one will be used as the escrow account and the other as a seller’s account.

Here is a summary of the steps:

The marketplace owner opens a Viva Wallet account to function as the marketplace account. This will be used to receive the marketplace commission fees.
Viva Wallet opens a Viva Wallet account to function as the escrow account with the marketplace owner as a beneficiary. This will be used to receive the customer payments, and then transfer payouts to sellers and commission fees to marketplace owner.
Each seller opens a Viva Wallet account to receive payouts from their sales on the marketplace.

Accept payments from customers

As a marketplace owner you need to integrate with one of Viva Wallet’s checkouts so you can accept customer payments into the escrow account.

Transfer payouts to sellers and commission fees to marketplace owner

For transfers from the escrow account to the marketplace accounts and the seller accounts, use the balance transfer API call.

Please also refer to the relevant tutorial Transfer fees and payouts (marketplace).

Perform refunds

To perform a refund, you would need to return funds from the seller accounts to the escrow account using the Obligations API, return funds from the marketplace account to the escrow account using the balance transfer API, and then return funds to the customer using the Cancel transaction API.

Please also refer to the relevant tutorial Refund purchase (marketplace).

Marketplace subscriptions

Depending on your business model, you may want to charge a subscription fee to your sellers. In such a case, you would need to use the Obligations API to charge the necessary subscription fee, in order to move funds from the seller accounts to the marketplace account.

Ready to go?

Complete and submit an online contact form with a summary of your requirements. The Viva Wallet sales team will review your request and get back to you as soon as possible.

Further information

Check out the related tutorials below for more details that may be relevant: