Today’s change will make big upgrades to the Stripe Connect offerings – allowing users to integrate three new business models (in addition to the two already supported). The upgrades are also designed to make it easier to build a brand new marketplace company by picking up the unpleasant logistical details such as on-boarding work for drivers, couriers and campaigners.
“We handle all the gritty details like identity verification, regulatory compliance, and a mobile-optimized on-boarding flow, allowing the marketplace to spend its own engineering time on other challenges more unique to their business,” Stripe noted in a pre-launch release.
The Express function will also allow sellers to get a holistic view of their business with a pre-built dashboard that will allow for transparent insights into things like how much money they’ve earned, or how much they owe.
The business model upgrades will see Stripe launching new payment-routing infrastructure that will allow business go beyond the 1-to-1 payments structure (e.g., Lyft rider → Lyft driver) and 1-to-many payments (e.g., Instacart customer → grocery store + shopper + courier) functionality the site already enjoys.
Going forward, marketplaces will be able to support many-to-many payments – for example, a platform for gym memberships that allows consumers pay a flat monthly subscription fee to the platform for access to a variety of gyms in an areas. Stripe now makes it possible for those several different gyms to receive monthly consolidated payments that vary depending on how often consumers use their facilities.
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The new infrastructure also makes it possible for crowdfunding platforms to hold funds – so that an entrepreneur receives half of their funds at the beginning of a project, and then receives the other half after the project is complete and the donors have received their products.
Finally, Stripe can now accommodate account debits for marketplaces that want to directly debit those sellers’ accounts for subscription or per-transaction fees.
Stripe Connect currently powers such platforms as Lyft Kickstarter, Shopify and Salesforce AppExchange, among many others.
