STRIPE: How to payout to Referral , after charging a user and paying out to a connect account while deducting out platform fee.?

Need help APIs
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My app has three user types: Guest, Host, and Referral. A Referral user can also be a Guest or Host, but with an added benefit. We pay them a commission on purchases made by Guests they refer.

Current Process:

  1. A Guest purchases something.
  2. We authorize the payment but hold the captured funds.
  3. Once the Host confirms the purchase, we capture the payment.
  4. We deduct our platform fee (e.g., 10% on a $100 purchase) and pay the remaining amount (e.g., $90) to the Host.
  5. Here’s the problem: If the Guest was referred, we want to pay the Referral user 25% of our platform fee (e.g., $2.5 from the $10 fee).

The Challenge:

Our platform fee takes time to settle into our account. This delay prevents us from paying the Referral user immediately.

Question:

Am I approaching this incorrectly? Is there a better way to handle this, or is it simply impossible without resorting to expensive workarounds (like creating a separate account for holding platform fees)?

@adamhholmes @Oliver-wholegraintech @artemzheg @georgecollier @mikeloc

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I would suggest waiting 45 or more days to pay any referral commission’s, almost all referral programs do this.

The risk is someone can take a lot of money from you by signing up and listing themselves as the referrer, get tons of commission, and then dispute all the transactions in stripe and get them refunded.

So waiting to pay out is best

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I agree with waiting to pay out until you have the funds in your account for 30 days (very common in the referral world). You can use a referral program like Rewardful (although I’m not sure they support paying a percentage of your application fee) or just manually calculate it and pay out using PayPal.