Morphed’s commerce-enabled marketplace infrastructure uses Stripe payments to facilitate fast, secure, online payments. Stripe doesn’t just allow you to collect payments from your customers, however. With Stripe payments you can also easily monetize your online marketplace.
As you’re about to see, there are various ways in which you can choose to monetize payments. However, the beauty of running your own services marketplace is that you don’t have to stick to just one monetization model. Instead, you could opt to implement more than one option and secure multiple revenue streams for your business. For example, you might charge sellers a monthly subscription fee as well as marking up each transaction. Of course, the trick is finding the balance between making enough revenue to justify your investment while remaining competitive.
This comprehensive guide from Stripe takes a deep dive into how SaaS platforms can monetize payments. Below, we take a look at four ways mentioned in the guide to charge customers for payments and payment-related features using Stripe marketplace payments.
1. Charge customers a fee to access payment functionality using tiered plans.
One way to monetize your services marketplace is to offer users different tiered plans. Lower tier plans are free or the most affordable options, and do not include payment functionality. In order to access payment functionality, users need to subscribe to the higher-tiered – and more expensive – plans.
2. Add a mark-up to each transaction that takes place in your services marketplace.
One of the appeals of choosing to monetize your marketplace by marking up each transaction that takes place on your platform is its simplicity. What’s more, a tiered plan system can work hand-in-hand with a mark-up system. For example, you could offer users on more expensive plans a lower percentage mark-up than users on lower tiers. In this way, your mark-up monetization model can also act as an incentive for users to sign up to higher tiered plans.
3. Charge users for access to more advanced payment features.
Stripe payments include some advanced payment features, such as chargeback protection and instant pay-outs. Charging users for these advanced payment features can be a good idea, especially for new marketplaces still testing the waters with regards to what their users will be happy to pay for.
4. Charge customers for using other payment gateways.
As Stripe explains, “Many platforms consolidate payments with one provider to help lower transaction costs and add fees if customers choose to use a different payment service. Shopify charges up to 2% in additional fees, depending on the plan, if customers process payments with a provider other than Shopify Payments.”
Introducing payment milestones with Morphed + Stripe.
With Morphed’s commerce-enabled marketplace technology and Stripe payments, service providers can set up payment milestones based on project deliverables or milestones. Setting up payment milestones – instead of waiting to collect the full project fee in one lump sum after delivery – makes it much less likely that providers will end up chasing late payments. Payment milestones can also serve as great motivational goals for service delivery teams.
