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Need advice about merchant setup

Hello everyone,

 

I have a question about how to set up and automate the merchant account to do some specific tasks.

Here it is the full story.

 

I have a merchant X, who has customers C1, C2 etc. The customer data is stored in CIM in X's account.

Merchant X has a web system providing a service Y to its customers (C1, C2 etc). Merchant X bills the customers via CIM on regular basis.

So far so good - this setup works perfectly in test mode.

 

But some of the X's customers (let it be C1) need to resell the service Y to their own end customers (let's call them E1, E2). When the end customers (E1, E2) pay for the service Y, they know they pay to C1, so they must not know about merchant X and the receipts must state their payments were made to C1.

Also, the merchant X has its own share in the payments made by the end customers (E1, E2), so the system need to transfer some amount to X's account every time a payment is made.

 

Here is the example "from the ideal world".

Merchant X provides service Y to customer C1.

C1 resells the service Y to the end customer E1.

Merchant X has 20% share of any payments made by the end customers for service Y.

The end customer E1 pays $100 to C1 for the service Y. E1 gets the order receipt from C1.

After the payment is made, the system takes 20% which is $20 and transfers it from C1 to merchant X.

 

 

So, the question is - how can I achieve such setup?

The setup needs not to be exactly the one I described - it is okay to have all payments to go to merchant X and then the merchant will transfer the due amount to customer C1 via the Unlinked Credit transaction.

However, the end customer C1 must receive the receipt saying they paid to C1, and NOT to merchant X.

 

As far as I understand, this cannot be done with the functions provided by CIM, but I even cannot formulate the correct search terms to look up the info in Authorize.Net's forums/knowledge base.

 

Hope I explained it well. 

Thanks for any help.

 

castor
Member
1 REPLY 1

You're trying to do a multi-level marketing system, which is all well and good - except that regular merchant systems do not do money transfers. The money can only go from one person into another single person's bank account, not be divided into several bank accounts. One way around this would be to only put the money into your bank account, then pay each person yourself (minus your percentage) once a month if the balance is over a certain amount, maybe more often if they request it specifically. The much more difficult solution would be to set up a system for doing full money transfers from the first person to the person above him and the person above him and so on. You need a tie in to the Automated Clearinghouse (ACH) system, probably through one of the larger branches of your bank.

 

Short version - Authorize.net does not do money transfers. It's a good solution for collecting the money from customers, but for money transfers you need a secondary system, and for that you need to talk to your bank.

TJPride
Expert