Compare marketplace payment providers

As you learned in our guide to marketplace payments, processing payments is a critical part of a marketplace's value proposition and its revenue strategy.

This makes choosing your payment partner one of the most important decisions for your marketplace technology stack.

This article series helps you make the best choice for your platform.

What's in this article:

• What is a marketplace payment provider: A marketplace payment provider is a third-party service provider that specializes in facilitating payments on marketplaces and two-sided platforms.
• Why choosing the right payment partner is important: Your payment partners will impact your marketplace UX, your revenue strategy, cost structure, and scalability.
• A list of the top marketplace payment services: our list includes big companies like Stripe, PayPal and Adyen as well as specialized providers like Mangopay, Tipalti, and Ryft.
• Compare the top payment payment providers and their key features in a comparison table.
• Payment partner checklist: What to double-check before you start building an integration to a payment provider.

Once you have your candidates selected, you may also find it helpful to read through our thorough overview articles on the top marketplace payment providers: Stripe Connect, PayPal from Marketplaces, Mangopay, and Adyen for Platforms.

Most online businesses, including marketplaces, use a third-party payment provider to process payments.

A payment service provider, or payment gateway, is a third-party service provider that facilitates monetary payments on your platform. In this article's lingo, a marketplace payment provider is a company that specializes in marketplaces and two-sided platforms or has a dedicated product for such businesses.

Examples of marketplace payment providers are Stripe's Connect product, (which comes pre-built with Sharetribe's marketplace builder), PayPal's marketplace product, and MANGOPAY.

Providing online payments is a heavily regulated field where security and technical reliability are essential. Third-party providers take care of compliance and security for you.

Payment providers usually charge a fee per transaction and/or payout. Additional fees for payment methods or additional services, setup fees, and maintenance fees may also apply.

There are hundreds of payment providers out there. However, most of them don’t support critical marketplace features like split payments and delayed payouts.

For example, payment giants like Worldpay, Chase Paymentech, and Fiserv handle trillions of transactions annually. None of them supports all of the five steps in the standard marketplace transaction flow.

Even with this limitation, there are dozens of service providers you could choose. The rest of this guide helps you narrow your list of candidates, compare their key features, and make the best decision for you.

First, however, a quick word about what is at stake in this decision.

The payment provider you choose will impact your marketplace UX, the speed and ease of building and maintaining your payments feature, your revenue strategy, scalability, and cost structure.

A few words on each point next.

When you make a payment online, many steps in the process are mandated by online payment regulation. However, there are differences between payment providers that have a big impact on your marketplace UX.

A key difference is whether the payment provider offers a white-label experience, a hosted experience, or a mix of both.

A white-label experience means that you build the payment flow inside your marketplace application. This way, you have control over the user-interface and branding.

Some payment providers offer a hosted experience, where the seller onboarding and customer payments happen by redirecting your user to the payment provider's website. With this model, you have limited control over the user-interface on the payment provider's website.

The most common solution combines hosted and white-label UX: Some stages of the payment flow use hosted pages, while others use white-label. This is usually a good compromise in terms of workload—more on that next.

Another component that depends on your payment provider is a multi-vendor shopping cart. Paying for multiple items from multiple different sellers with a single payment is a complicated feature that many payment providers don't support.

The choice between a white-label and hosted experience impacts the total cost of building and maintaining your payment integration.

Typically, a white-label experience requires much more work to build than a fully hosted payment experience. You may also need to do some work on PCI compliance.

A white-label experience also tends to require more maintenance: as payment regulations evolve, you're responsible for keeping your white-label payments compliant.

For example, on Sharetribe-powered marketplaces, some pages in the payment flow are white-label while the seller onboarding uses Stripe-hosted pages. This is because compliance with the Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines is critical in this step, and the requirements differ between countries and regions and are subject to change as payment regulation evolves.

Mangopay and Adyen are other well-known payment companies that let you build a mix of white-label and hosted payment experience, whereas on payment providers like PayPal, the entire payment UX is hosted.

Most marketplaces monetize through commission: they take a percentage or a flat fee from every sale made on the platform. This requires a split payment functionality that's relatively complex to build, so most generic payment provider companies don't offer it.

Another relatively common revenue strategy is subscription payments: the marketplace charges a recurring fee from users to use the platform. Marketplaces may also use a combination of commission and subscription models. Some marketplace concepts may also require a functionality where the sellers on the marketplace charge a recurring subscription fee from their customers, and the marketplace charges its commission from those subscription fees.

Not all payment companies that offer split payments allow you to process subscriptions, for instance.

The countries, currencies, and payment methods your payment provider supports will set the constraint to where your platform can expand (with that particular payment provider, at least).

A payment service provider typically charges a fee on all transactions it powers. Some companies may have rather complicated additional fees based on additional services, payment methods, countries, accounts, or similar. Some may charge an initial setup fee, some may have a minimum monthly fee. Some payment providers may not even accept customers with low transaction volumes. Needless to say, this impacts the cost of running your marketplace and will probably need to be taken into account in your pricing strategy, for instance.

Marketplace entrepreneurs are usually best off with a payment provider that specializes in marketplaces.

Sharetribe-powered marketplaces come with Stripe Connect already integrated, but it’s possible to integrate your marketplace with any other 3rd party payment gateway. While most of our customers are using Stripe, some have built integrations to services like Paypal, Mangopay, Trusapp, Two, Razorpay, and Tipalti. 

Here are the top 10 payment providers you could consider for your marketplace:

Stripe is one of the best-known payment service providers in the world. Stripe Connect is built specifically to cater to online marketplace needs. Some famous marketplace unicorns like Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and Thumbtack trust Stripe Connect as their payment provider, as do hundreds of Sharetribe-powered marketplaces.

Paypal is another global payment provider that online marketplaces have used for years. Paypal is also the largest company in our comparison, with a market capitalization of over $60 billion. Like Stripe, Paypal built a product dedicated to online marketplaces, Paypal for Marketplaces. It lists eBay, Poshmark, and StockX as customers.

In 2015, Adyen launched Adyen for Platforms (formerly MarketPay) specifically for marketplaces. The company lists eBay and Vinted as its marketplace customers. The company has focused on winning market share by offering lower fees than its competitors. At the time of writing, Adyen has a market capitalization of over $45 billion.

Mangopay caters purely to marketplace businesses and crowdfunding platforms. It’s a relatively well-known alternative to the giants, especially in Europe. Mangopay was acquired by French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in 2015 and then acquired again in 2023 by AdventPay, while Crédit Mutuel remained a minority shareholder. Marketplaces on MangoPay include Vinted, Rakuten, and Wallapop.

Ryft also focuses solely on marketplaces and platforms. The company was founded in 2019 by Sadra Hosseini and Alex Mackenzie, entrepreneurs who previously built their own online marketplace business and wanted to create a payment solution to address the pain points they discovered. Ryft powers over 100 marketplaces in Europe and the UK and is currently pursuing a Series A round with a valuation of £30 million.

Zai is an online payment platform that offers payment solutions for companies in Australia. The company is a merger of two startups, Assembly Payments and CurrencyFair, in 2021. It has some of the most well-known marketplaces from its home market as customers, including the Australian property management app Managed.

BlueSnap has been around since 2002 and has raised more than $68 million in funding. They launched a marketplace product that’s still relatively new, so not many use cases are available. BlueSnap has a solid international presence, so if you require many supported countries, their marketplace solution might be worth exploring.

Founded in 2010, Tipalti is also a US-based payment provider for online businesses and marketplaces. The payments automation solution boasts being the only one in its field to streamline every phase of the payment processing workflow into one all-encompassing cloud platform. Tipalti differentiates by offering flat fees instead of the standard percentage fee on transactions Tipalti could be an excellent solution for marketplaces with some scale that are beyond the initial startup stage.

Balance focuses on business-to-business marketplaces. B2B marketplace transactions can be highly complex, so having a payment solution dedicated to managing them can help a founder navigate these types of transactions.

Compare the availability, pricing, and key features of top payment providers for marketplaces below.

Before you start building an integration with any payment provider, contact the payment provider's customer support team and make sure that:

• They are available in the country where you operate your business.
• They support a marketplace-specific payment flow, handle the Know Your Customer process for your providers, and can split payments and delay payouts.
• They can process the currencies of your marketplace.
• They can do payouts to your providers' country/countries.
• You are eligible to get access to the live environment.
• You know the process of how to get access to the live environment.
• You are familiar with all the fees involved.

You can find more on the key features in the first article of the marketplace payments guide.

A marketplace payment service provider is a third-party partner that lets you process online payments in a way that is smooth, secure, and legally compliant.

Your choice of payment provider impacts many things: your marketplace UX, the speed and ease of building and maintaining your payment feature, your revenue strategy, scalability, and cost structure.

Our general recommendation is to choose a payment provider that either specializes in marketplaces or has a dedicated product catering to two-sided platforms. This ensures all the key functionality is there.

Sharetribe's no-code marketplace builder comes with an integration with Stripe Connect, but it's possible to implement any third-party payment service with code.

If this article has helped you narrow down your list of payment partner candidates, you might be interested in checking out some of our overview articles on the top marketplace payment providers: Stripe Connect, PayPal from Marketplaces, Mangopay, and Adyen for Platforms.