Making and receiving payments?

Question

I am looking at building a Website that needs to receive payments from clients and make payments to service providers. Payments will most likely come in as Credit Card purchases and then monthly I will most likely have to pay the service providers after taking a fee. I know there are a lot of options for accepting money via a payment gateway but I also would like to make payments to the bank accounts of the service providers as there could be a 1000+ service providers and I don't want to have to cut all those checks or have to manually send them the money. What options do I have for automating the payment of service providers which will mostly be individuals and not companies.

Answer 1

If you're based in the USA then you're going to want to look at ACH APIs for doing this. Generally these will charge a per-payment fee rather than a % based fee like you'd be charged for doing credit card processing.

Here's a quick list of ACH processors I found via a quick Google for ACH API

• BancBox - http://www.bancbox.com/
• ACH Works - http://www.achworks.com/
• Balanced - https://www.balancedpayments.com/
• FirstACH - http://www.firstach.com/
• ACH Direct - http://www.achdirect.com/

Answer 2

In this case you're looking at two, whilst similar, completely distinct operations.

as Far as accepting payments your options are credit card (via a gateway like authorize.net), payment providers (pay pal, amazon, etc.) or manually charged via a terminal and of course cash & checks.

to pay your providers its all about what they offer as methods. It might be manual (checks), web based payments or there might be an api they offer.