Hi @MyriamBoure!
I suspect that the best solution for your particular requirement is still going to be to an implementation of Mangopay. I understand your use case and it is certainly in my mind, but unfortunately I don’t think that Stripe Connect (or any other platform) is going to be our silver bullet for all payment gateway features we would like. Stripe Connect gives us a lot of the high priority features in a relatively universal gateway, but it is really designed to model a set of relationships between a single platform (eg. the OFN) and its users (eg. OFN shops). There is no provision for the users to then have connected accounts themselves which they can distribute funds to, so I don’t think we will be able to use it for multi-vendor payment gateway support.
###Scenario: using multiple Stripe Connect accounts on one platform
I suppose in theory, it could be possible to decentralise the model by creating a Stripe Connect account for each shop, but this is problematic for a bunch of reasons:
- Stripe requires that each Connect user registers their “platform” before it is approved. My understanding is that registration of a platform is non-trivial. So we would have to somehow do this for each shop who wanted to use Stripe.
- I am not even sure that Stripe themselves would allow us to register multiple Stripe Connect accounts on one platform - it is certainly not something they mention…
- We would need customers to re-enter their details for each individual Shop they wanted to purchase through on the OFN, because the individual Stripe Connect accounts for each shop are not linked in any way.
- All of the API key security headaches would resurface, because we would have to store a separate API key for each shop
There may be other issues too, but IMHO that is enough things to make this particular idea unworkable. We lose a lot of the benefits of the standard implementation (easy management of security for the platform, ease of use for customers and shops), for a system which looks fairly unpleasant to administrate to me…
Multi-vendor gateway support: ie. Mangopay
I understand the multi-vendor gateway use case and think it supporting it is a great idea, saving time, and allowing support of business models that require direct distributions of funds to producers for legal/tax reasons in your jurisdiction. Unfortunately however, I think the highest priority for now for the global community has to be a (relatively) universal gateway with a low barrier-to-entry, capable of handling recurring payments. I think Stripe Connect fits that bill.
As I said, from the little I know about it, I think Mangopay is absolutely the go-to for this feature, but think its implementation is going to need to be its own feature. It is a significant body of work, and sadly we simply don’t have the resources to implement both Stripe Connect and Mangopay at once.
As always, I’m very happy to work with you to map out exactly what features are required and what implementation looks like, so we can get an idea of next steps and budget, etc… 