split payment between two parties

[dapottster]

Hi,
I was wondering if anybody knows how to split a payment between two parties. I will be selling products for people through my website, and would like to have the money go to the actual seller while a portion of it is skimmed off for me. Does anybody know if that is possible with ZenCart?
I am new to ZenCart but have heard wonderful things about the program and this forum. If anybody can help me out, I would really appreciate it. I would really like to get my website up and running, but I can't seem to find a way to do my sales. I really don't want to take full purchase price directly and then have to send the seller's share to them.
I know somebody can help me with this, because it is similar to the way the payment method works with eBay or PayPal.
Thanks for all your help.
Matt

[kuroi]

I assume you mean split three ways, since your payment gateway or paypal may well skim their commission off before sending the payment on.

The normal way to do what you suggest is for you to collect the payment and then send it on to the people whose products you have sold at an agreed frequency with your commission deducted.

[dapottster]

I know that what ever method I use for collecting payment will automatically skim, so I was just kind of ignoring that. My original thought was to take the full amount and then pay the supplier the arranged amount, but I know that there has to be a way to do it automatically. One of the problems with taking the full amount is that I am actually taking in $12 instead of $2 (hypothetically) and would have to reflect that in taxes. Or am I wrong in thinking that?
Thanks for your help!

[stevesh]

There's no way to split a payment between two recipients automatically with any of the available payment modules.

The problem you mentioned is a question for your accountant, but if you're collecting $12 and passing along $10, you will only be taxed on the $2 difference.

[thisisheren]

Hi dapottster,
I am new this forum and came here because i am also having the same problem as yours.

I have really made a lot of research on the split payment + paypal, but all i was able to find was a negative answer, This is what i found, this feature in paypal is not yet developed.

Is there any other method to solve my problem?
Is there any other gateway that uses this service and how safe and secure it is?

Hope, you have made solution by now, so cn you please share your thoughs with me, it will be really helpful.

With Hopes and Regards,
Heren

[kuroi]

This isn't a question of the functionality not yet being available from payment processors. It is extremely unlikely ever to be available.

When a customer comes to your site they're dealing with you and you have the responsibility for delivering your end of the transaction. You have a contract with the Payment Gateway to this effect that includes the steps that they can take to recover the money you were paid if the customer says you failed to deliver.

Your suppliers are not party to that agreement and so the payment provider would have no basis to recover money from them - so they gonna do it.

And nor really would you want them to. Remember if one of your suppliers went bust or didn't deliver ... you're on the hook to refund the customers. So normally you would want to introduce some lag into payment system to protect yourself.

However, Paypal does offer a bulk payment service which is ideally suited to what you're trying to do. It means that you can collect payments in the normal way, write a small data extract for the amounts that are due to your suppliers and upload it, say daily, to Paypal to make the payments.