Do you mean a situation where the service provider is not directly providing the service to the customer, like paying out a caterer for your office lunch? I'd love to better understand exactly what you're trying to use this for.
The short answer is that we're also really excited about the "many-to-many" use case of moving money around. There are many hurdles to getting there, and we're checking them off one by one. This is a leap towards that eventual world.
Pretty much. But it's a little hard to envision at that scale.
Think instead about a large company with a set of approved vendors. Execs submit purchase orders to the vendors. The vendors get paid out by check.
Instead, you can payout the vendors through Stripe.
Edit: As I think about this more, I don't think it should be free from my own account, but it's hard to reason what ACH pricing should be. I can send an automated check for $1.50 with Lob today.
It'd be great to be able to do with Stripe what we can do with POs. Here are Three POs for three vendors associated with this purchase (80%, 10% & 10% respectively).
And then directly push the funds to each with separate transactions, without having to have a 'master account' that pulls in 100% (and takes the full fee structure on the nose), then internally/itself pushes out 80% and 10% to others.
We want to create a service that allows us to ship items on behalf of vendors who just upload artwork. Similar to CafePress. I've been trying to find out if Stripe's "special case transfer" could possibly be used for this but am not having much luck.
(i.e. Accepting a $30 charge for a customer and doing two transfers using source_transaction, one for $10 to Vendor 1 and one for $20 to Vendor 2)
I know that it would be compliant if we setup a Stripe account for each vendor and created the charge directly with their Stripe account but we want to be able to have customers checkout with items from multiple vendors.
The short answer is that we're also really excited about the "many-to-many" use case of moving money around. There are many hurdles to getting there, and we're checking them off one by one. This is a leap towards that eventual world.