Today’s installment in alternatives to Paypal is quite an alternative indeed, a special and unique payment tool. Wepay is a payment platform for platforms.
Wepay is designed to work to facilitate payments with platform-based enterprises such as crowdfunding, small business software, and online marketplaces. Wepay believes that these platforms cause important connections in society and it wants to help facilitate these.
Wepay points out that online payments can be complicated, and always risky. Wepay aims to minimize the risk that had previously seemed inevitable.
The payment ecosystem is populated by the buyer, the seller, the platform, the payment facilitator, and the payment gateway, with support provided by the acquirer and the card association.
Many of the parties listed above are self-explanatory. However, to explain some of the less obvious: the platform is the business that connects the buyer and the seller; the payment facilitator is an entity that takes responsibility for the funds being transacted.
The payment gateway is in the background, providing APIs; the acquirer is a bank underwriting the payment facilitator. The card association work between issuing and acquiring banks. These are a.k.a. credit cards—Visa, Mastercard, etc.
Each link in this chain is subject to various risk or not receiving payment, losing funds, etc. Wepay aims to lessen the risk.
A merchant who will be accepting payments via a platform can set up an account with Wepay. It’s not just for people trading pizza money, etc. From there, the merchant can facilitate checkouts, payment, necessary refunds, etc. Wepay then validates the credit card, all the steps of accepting payments.
Here’s a look at the menu on the homepage of wepay, which will give you an idea of the services available:
In terms of pricing credit card payments require a 2.9% plus 30 cents, while bank payments will set you back 1% plus 30 cents.
Those in charge of crowdfunding can use wepay for accepting donations. There’s a lot to learn about wepay—people interested in possibly using this site should check it out.