Payments for marketplaces

This guide is designed for marketplace platforms who connect buyers and sellers for exchange of goods or services. It outlines the benefits of Airwallex's solutions and provides guidance on how to implement these without requiring in-depth expertise in the domain.

Overview

A typical marketplace platform serves as a digital intermediary, connecting buyers and sellers who want to exchange goods or services. They provide the infrastructure without directly owning inventory themselves. Airwallex's solutions are applicable to the marketplace business model within a number of industries, such as retail, resale, but also services and digital goods marketplaces (e.g., freelancer platforms, gig economy), travel, and more.

With the exponential growth of global trade and cross-border eCommerce specifically, most marketplace platforms operate in multiple countries and facilitate cross-border transactions. As a result, they have a need to streamline the payment complexities of international expansion via a financial infrastructure partner.

Airwallex's Payments for Platforms solution addresses this need by making cross-border online payment acceptance easy, reducing FX conversion costs, and seamlessly paying out to sellers. With broad geographical coverage, platforms can swiftly enter new markets and monetize sellers. The solution ensures reliable and timely payments, offers low-cost and high-speed transactions through a localized payment rail network that Airwallex has built over time.

Solution model

Collect payments and manage funds

• Use Airwallex as the payment service provider (PSP) to acquire funds: See details in Process payments and manage funds.
• Use other payment service providers (PSPs) as the acquirer: See details in Get started with PSP-agnostic solutions.

Pay out funds to sellers

There are 2 solution models for marketplaces to pay sellers, with differences in fund ownership, seller onboarding requirements and supported geographical coverage for payouts.