How to allow users to accept payment from other users?

Question

I am working on an apartment CRM of sorts and I would like to allow renters to be able to pay bills online. My issue is that I don't know how you would implement a system that would work in this case. I would both need to accept payment from landlords/owners for providing a service to them and also allow them to collect rent from their renters(users). Any tips on setting up something like this? For the accepting payments from landlords/owners part, that is pretty straightforward as I would just need to integrate some payment gateway but the other part has me stumped.

For security and accountability reasons I don't want to be responsible for moving funds myself from the rents collected to each individual owner. I would like to keep each payment relationship (landlords and renters) separate if that makes any sense.

In case it matters, I am using the PHP framework CodeIgniter for this.

Answer 1

You'll have to set up some sort of payment gateway account for each owner. You can save their settings for the gateway in your database.

Answer 2

Here's the challenge...when you're talking about removing yourself from the money moving game, I believe you're talking about multiple merchant accounts. Now I'm sure that there's some sort of discount out there for running multiple accounts, but generally the merchants aren't your friend unless you're doing some serious traffic--the last merchant account I worked on did about $1million USD/year and we still didn't feel like we were very high on the totem pole with customer service or negotiating position for merchant fees. You'll be talking about $30/month (give or take) plus a percentage of the transaction as the cost to operate the merchant account.

Fees add up in a hurry. Not a problem if you're doing volume, but if you're only talking 25 renters and then only a portion of them use the service, you may get hit harder that you can justify with them spread amongst multiple sites.

Consider some already done options out there:

https://www.erentpayment.com/Default.aspx http://www.landlord.com/rent_collection_online.htm http://www.rentmatic.com/

Obviously, I don't know the specifics of your situation, so these may not be a great option. Regardless, it never hurts to explore alternatives if only to learn what UI patterns they used to achieve the goal you're shooting for.