One website, two sellers?

June 2, 2016 10:04 AM

Is there a way to have money go directly to a third-party supplier when selling their goods online?

I have a friend who runs Company A. Company A has a website that sells their own products. They also sell products by Company B. At the moment they are cutting regular checks to Company B when Company B products get sold. They are hoping to eliminate this bit of financial administration and just have the money go directly to Company B at the point of sale without the customer having to do anything extra or leave Company A's website.

In their own words: "a 'one-stop-shop' for our goods AND their goods, without having the buyer be inconvenienced by having to go to multiple shopping carts."

Looking for recommendations on platforms, software, plugins, etc that offer this functionality.

Thanks!

posted by jammy to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Something that's not immediately clear to me: are you selling Company B's products at cost and then cutting Company B a check, without taking any cut of the sales? In that case, it should theoretically be possible to use two different payment provider setups, one for your own products and one for theirs, and have their payment provider setup credit their accounts directly. I'm not aware of a storefront solution that's set up to work that way though. You would likely have to pay a consultant to figure out the details for something like that as it's not a common need.

If you're taking a percentage of the sale of Company B's product, then you could potentially do something similar, but it would almost certainly be a custom solution at that point. But you probably wouldn't want to anyway, as your payment providers would essentially double-dip with their transaction fees at that point, and unless they only take a pure percentage as the fee, it would end up costing more overall. In that case, it's much better to batch up what you owe Company B and cut them a check than pay the additional per-transaction fee in that case.

(Caveat: I've set up a payment system for a website before, but nothing terribly complex, so I wouldn't consider myself an expert.)
posted by Aleyn at 4:15 PM on June 2, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks, Aleyn.

My research indicates that a custom solution is probably what my friend needs as well.
posted by jammy at 6:33 AM on June 6, 2016