Marketplace payments
Marketplace payments that are fair to customers and providers
A booking marketplace needed to handle payments, cancellations, refunds and provider payouts fairly and without manual work. We built the payments side of the platform.
- A beauty and wellness marketplace
- Software engineering, Systems integration and APIs
- 14 September 2026
- 3 min read
Client anonymised. No figures are published for this engagement.
The challenge
Taking a payment is the easy part of running a marketplace. The difficult part is everything around it: late cancellations, missed appointments, refunds, and making sure providers are paid correctly and on time.
Handled by hand, these situations lead to disputes, lost revenue and unhappy providers, and they take up time the business should be spending on growth.
The goals
- Apply clear, fair rules to both customers and providers
- Let the operator set and change those rules without engineering work
- Pay providers correctly and on time
- Keep a full record of every payment, refund and payout
How we helped
We built the payments side of the platform and connected it to an established payments provider. The operator’s policies are applied automatically, and each booking keeps the terms that applied when it was made, so a later policy change never affects an existing booking.
Every movement of money is recorded and can be traced, and anything that needs a decision, such as a refund, goes through a review rather than happening without a record.
The outcome
Disputes can be settled from the record of what was agreed at the time. Providers are paid reliably, and the operator can adjust its policies as the marketplace grows.
More delivered work
A booking marketplace for customers, providers and the business that runs it
A beauty and wellness business wanted to launch a marketplace that customers and service providers could both trust. We designed and built the platform from the ground up.
Making every payment verifiable for a payments business
A payments business needed to be certain that every payment was correct and complete, and to prove it to merchants and auditors. We built the system that gives them that certainty.
If this sounds like your situation, start with an assessment
An assessment takes two to three weeks, and gives you a written view of where you are today and a costed plan. It does not have to lead to a build, and that is a perfectly good outcome.