eCommerce is skyrocketing, and marketplaces are becoming key players in the global growth of online shopping. According to research by the eCommerce Foundation and Nyenrode Business University, almost 40% of online retail sales will occur on marketplace platforms by 2020, and another study has predicted that online marketplaces will drive sales of more than $7 trillion by 2024.
In response to a strong demand, we’re proud to announce CCV’s new Platform Payments Solution, designed especially for eCommerce marketplace platforms that work with sub-vendors and third-party merchants. This solution automatically splits and distributes payments between the different stakeholders involved in each customer purchase, without the need for billing or settlement processes.
The Reasons for Building a Platform Payments Solution
The attraction of an eCommerce marketplace is that the consumer can fill their basket with multiple items from different suppliers – all in one place. They benefit from increased choice, competitive prices, and fast delivery. Consumers often don’t know whether they’re buying direct from the platform or from one of the platform’s approved third-party vendors. The experience is seamless.
However, from the perspective of marketplaces and sub-vendors, this isn’t quite so easy. If a customer pays all of the due amount to the platform, a complex process of billing, reconciliation, and settlement begins. For smaller businesses, this might actually be done manually – the marketplace’s commission needs to be calculated, and the rest of the money distributed accurately to all stakeholders.
It’s difficult to scale an eCommerce marketplace business if these inefficiencies persist, because the platform and the sub-vendor are caught in a circle of time-intensive administration. Furthermore, there can be legal implications if a platform receives the whole initial amount from the customer, meaning they have more responsibility for managing the order.
What Our Platform Payments Solution Does
As your Payment Service Provider (PSP), CCV can now automatically split payments between your platform and your sub-vendors. This means that when we receive a transaction, we know that €10 goes to Merchant A, €20 goes to Merchant B, and the remaining commission comes directly to you. Payments are split in the background, and all parties receive the funds immediately – without the platform having to organise billing or settlement.
Implementing split payments with CCV is very simple as the feature is part of the open REST API connection of the CCV Online Payment Gateway API – which integrates with any software-based platform. This integration is generally straightforward, but we are ready and available to help, answer questions from developers, and guide your team through the integration project from start-to-finish. The ultimate goal is for sub-vendors to only board once: one registration to connect themselves with your platform and CCV’s PSP solution at the same time.
The other benefit of this solution is how it integrates with MyCCV. Once we’ve validated the details of your sub-vendors, we can activate a MyCCV account just for them. This allows your partner merchants to monitor transactions through their own custom portal, in the same way that your own marketplace can.
Overall, this solution is beneficial for marketplaces and vendors – because it significantly reduces admin and paperwork, provides used insights into transactions, and makes getting paid far more efficient.
Who Can Use the CCV Platform Payments Solution?
Our solution will help any business which brings together supply and demand in the digital environment. It’s easy to imagine platforms such as Amazon or eBay when we talk about online marketplaces, but in fact the need for splitting payments stretches far beyond these Goliath stores…
For example, to develop our solution we used the input from a Dutch platform that matches independent healthcare professionals with home-based patients. Professionals use this platform to get booked by healthcare providers (companies), and in the short term also by patients and their families. CCV’s platform payments solution will split the platform’s transactions to accurately distribute payments and commission – reducing the manual work required on managing invoices as the company grows.
We expect to be sharing a detailed case study about this specific implementation soon, so stay tuned!
No matter whether you run an eCommerce marketplace for services or products – or whether it’s retail, healthcare, or digital goods – this solution is powerful. And many other tools are only available to huge global brands, but CCV is making payment-splitting accessible to medium-sized online platforms.
As an omnichannel player, CCV also provides physical payment infrastructure such as contactless terminals, to create a truly integrated payments environment for your online and offline business.
To learn more about our Platform Payments Solution, get in touch with us today.
About the author:
Anke Vandenbussche is Strategic Product Manager at CCV. After more than a decade of experience in the financial sector, Anke has built up expertise in eCommerce entrepreneurship and online payments. As Strategic Product Manager at CCV, Anke is responsible for the strategic and commercial direction of the online payment platform, CCV Pay.