Revenue Sharing And Multiple Storefronts

Business
1

I have posted this before over the years with little success in finding answers. I am hoping someone has had some experience or used something recently that would fit our needs.

We provide websites for sports teams and have about 4,000 sites currently. Our software allows teams to create their own website where they can log in and create schedules, rosters, photo galleries, etc. We are adding a simple storefront for teams to add items to sell, player registration forms, etc.

We’re ideally looking for a third party processor checkout solution that allows us to make money on each sale though. Basically a Google Checkout or PayPayl Checkout style service that kicks back a % to us. I’ve looked a little into PayPal’s partner program but there isn’t much info on the site and it gets confusing quickly. Does such a thing exist?

The other option is something like Shopify’s referral service and then integrate each team’s store onto our site with our API. There are a few problems with something like this though. Most of these sites charge a monthly fee, whereas most of our teams are probably selling a few t-shirts and doing something like camp or lettings players pay dues online, so there isn’t a lot of volume and $300 a year is a lot to them, so we’d rather just go with a product that charges per transaction. Also, owners have to go to Shopify to edit and update products which requires another login and password rather than easily editing it from the team website admin area. Also, users are redirected to Shopify to make their purchase which can be confusing.

Any help or past experiences are greatly appreciated, I’ve been searching a long time and haven’t found much on the subject.

2

I have had some experience in this (several clients had such problem, take % from user sales), however in all cases this problem was solved using coding on the storefront side, not on the payment gateway side. So I am not sure does Paypal provide such kind of service from its side or not.

The most simple method to achieve this work-flow is to implement some reporting system which calculates commissions for all sales. In the end of the month administrator (you) charge commissions according these reports. The bad side of this solution is that you must store provider CC info to charge the commission later.

The more flexible solution is to charge commission “on the fly”. I.e. when customer pay via CC on the site, 2 transactions will be made: first one to transfer money from customer’s CC to provider and second one to transfer commission to admin (you). However, this method requires a payment gateway works in so-called “direct” mode (without redirection to the payment site). For instance, Google Checkout does not support direct mode, also standard paypal merchant account does not support it (only paypal PRO, but it is quiet expensive).

3

I’d just keep track of the individual sites sales history in a separate table visible to both, you and the store admin and automatically invoice them when a certain amount is reached.