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Payment Infrastructure

Marketplace Payment Platform

Split payouts for multi-party commerce

Presentation

Overview

Marketplaces face a payments problem that simple gateways cannot solve: money coming in from a buyer often needs to be split between the platform, one or more sellers, and sometimes third parties such as delivery partners, before it is settled out. Pay Engineers builds the payment infrastructure that makes this split explicit, auditable and compliant, rather than something patched together with manual transfers and spreadsheets.

At the centre of the platform is a commission and settlement engine that knows, for every transaction, exactly how much is owed to whom and when. This is not just an accounting convenience: regulators and acquiring partners increasingly expect marketplaces to demonstrate exactly how funds flow to sub-merchants, particularly under card scheme marketplace rules and payment services regulation.

We build this as a platform layer that can sit on top of your existing acquiring or PSP relationship, so you do not need to become a full payment institution to operate a compliant marketplace payment flow, though the architecture is equally suited to businesses that do hold their own licence.

Who This Is For

  • Marketplaces connecting buyers to independent sellers, freelancers or service providers
  • Platforms operating a take-rate or commission model across a distributed seller base
  • Gig-economy and on-demand businesses that need to pay out earnings quickly and transparently
  • Businesses currently managing split payments manually and hitting operational or compliance limits

What You Get

  • Sub-merchant KYC workflows so sellers are verified and risk-scored before they can receive funds
  • Escrow holding that keeps buyer funds secure until agreed release conditions are met
  • A commission engine calculating platform fees, taxes and any third-party splits automatically on every transaction
  • Configurable seller payout schedules, from real-time to batched, matched to your risk and cash-flow needs

Technical Approach

The platform is built on Laravel with PostgreSQL as the system of record for balances, commissions and payout schedules, and Redis-backed queue workers handling the asynchronous, high-volume work of calculating splits and processing payouts without blocking the buyer-facing checkout flow.

Every transaction is decomposed at capture time into its constituent parts, buyer payment, platform fee, seller proceeds, and any additional splits, so that the commission engine never needs to reverse-engineer intent from a raw settlement file. Payout schedules are modelled per seller or seller cohort, allowing you to offer faster payouts to trusted or higher-tier sellers while keeping newer or higher-risk sellers on a more conservative schedule. Queue-based processing ensures payout runs, however large, do not compete with real-time checkout traffic for system resources.

Delivery Process

  • Discovery of your marketplace model: take rate, seller risk profile, payout expectations and existing acquiring relationship
  • Design of the commission, escrow and payout data model, validated against real transaction scenarios from your business
  • Sprint-based build, typically starting with sub-merchant onboarding and the commission engine before payout automation
  • Reconciliation testing to confirm every split accounts for exactly one hundred percent of each transaction
  • Phased rollout, often starting with a subset of sellers before opening to the full marketplace

Outcomes and Benefits

  • Automated, auditable seller payouts that remove manual transfer work from your operations team
  • A defensible compliance position on fund flows to sub-merchants, ready for acquirer or regulatory review
  • Flexibility to introduce new commission models or seller tiers without a platform rebuild
  • Faster seller payouts, which directly improves seller satisfaction and retention on the platform

Technologies

Laravel PostgreSQL Redis Queue workers

FAQ

The platform calculates and records the split for every transaction at the point of sale, allocating the correct share to the platform fee, one or more sellers, and any third parties such as delivery or affiliate partners, all within a single ledger entry so the split is atomic and auditable. Commission rules are configurable per seller, category or transaction type, so you can support flat fees, tiered percentages or hybrid pricing without custom code for each seller. Every split is traceable back to the originating transaction, which is what acquiring partners and regulators expect when reviewing marketplace fund flows. This removes the need for manual transfers or spreadsheet-based reconciliation that many marketplaces start with.
We build a sub-merchant onboarding flow that collects the business and identity information your acquiring partner or card scheme rules require, integrated with KYB and KYC screening providers so sellers are checked before they can receive payouts. Onboarding status, required documents and verification state are tracked per seller, giving your operations team visibility into who is pending, approved or flagged for review. Where scheme marketplace rules require it, we implement the specific sub-merchant identification and reporting fields your acquirer needs to submit. This is designed to satisfy the level of scrutiny acquirers and regulators apply to marketplace fund flows, not just basic seller registration.
Yes, the platform supports configurable holding periods before payout release, whether that is a fixed delay for fraud review, a milestone-based release tied to delivery confirmation, or an escrow-style hold for high-risk categories. Hold rules can vary by seller risk tier, category or transaction value, and every hold and release event is logged with the reason and responsible actor. This gives you the flexibility to balance seller cash flow expectations against your own risk exposure. Where your business model requires it, we can integrate a full escrow workflow with dispute handling rather than a simple time-based delay.
Payout schedules are configurable per seller or seller tier, supporting daily, weekly or on-demand payout models, and payouts are delivered through your chosen rails, typically bank transfer or push-to-card. The platform batches and generates payout files or API calls to your payment provider, then reconciles the resulting confirmations back against the ledger so partial failures are caught rather than silently lost. Sellers can see upcoming and historical payouts through a portal if you choose to include that in scope. Fee deductions, refund adjustments and chargebacks are all netted correctly into the payout calculation rather than requiring manual correction.
Disputes and refunds are modelled to correctly reverse the original split, adjusting platform fee, seller and any third-party allocations rather than simply refunding the buyer and leaving the ledger unbalanced. Where a seller has already been paid out before a dispute is raised, the platform tracks the resulting negative balance and applies it against future payouts according to rules you configure. We build clear audit trails for every dispute event, since this is exactly the kind of scenario acquiring partners scrutinise during periodic marketplace risk reviews. Chargeback liability allocation between platform and seller is configurable to match your seller agreements.
A first release covering sub-merchant onboarding, split calculation, basic payout scheduling and reconciliation typically takes 4 to 6 months, with escrow-style holds, seller portals or advanced risk tiering delivered in later phases. Timeline depends significantly on how many seller categories, currencies and payout rails are in scope at launch. We recommend launching with a simpler payout model for an initial seller cohort and expanding complexity once the core split and reconciliation engine is proven in production. This phased approach reduces the risk of discovering ledger or compliance issues only after full-scale rollout.

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