Automatic recurring metered billing

[sk24iam]

On my marketplace I plan on charging sellers a fee to third party sellers to use my business. There is a final value fee they they will be billed based on a percentage of their sale. Every month I would like to charge their credit card stored on authorize.net based on how much each users total fees from the previous month.

Can someone direct me in the right to direction to a PHP API that allows this variable amount of reoccurring billing?

Thanks

[TJPride]

The easiest solution is to use CIM (Customer Information Manager). Essentially, you set up a billing profile for each person, which allows you to generate custom charges whenever you want on an as-needed basis, without having to store any credit card data in your own system. You can choose to use either regular CIM or hosted CIM depending on what level of PCI security you want.

[larrykluger]

There are three parties involved in what you describe:

1) The Sellers

2) The end customers

3) You, the market place owner.

Who is handling the transaction between the sellers and the end customers? Are the sellers doing it themselves, or do you want to charge the end customers on behalf of the sellers?

If the sellers are charging the end customers, then you need a reliable way to know the size of the transaction so that you can then charge the seller your appropriate commission. If you're relying on the merchants telling you the amount of the sale, how do you know that they are telling you the right amount? 

If you want to charge the end customers on behalf of the sellers

Then you're now in the realm of 3rd party transactions. afaik, Auth.Net doesn't support 3rd party trans at this time. Some of their competitors do. 

And you can't act as the merchant to the end customers unless you ARE the merchant (the one selling stuff to them). Otherwise you run into lots of legal issues. (You'd be acting like a PayPal.)

Good luck with your venture.

[sk24iam]

The sellers are charing the buyers.  I am using auth.net to charge the sellers the fee based on their transactions.  Can CIM automatically charge sellers variable amount every month or does admin need to manually charge seller?

Thanks

[TJPride]

Yes, if you set up an automated script to calculate the charges and generate them against the corresponding profile ID's.