Compare Marketplace Payments in Australia

How we compare marketplace payments

We list 7 platforms that can collect money from a buyer and pay it out to a third party. A published rate card exists for 1 provider, and a quote applies to 6 providers. Quoting is normal here: a platform deal is priced on volume, seller count, payout speed and risk. We do not estimate on a vendor's behalf. Every figure comes from the provider's own pricing page.

The calculator takes your monthly GMV, your average order value, the commission you take from each sale and your number of sellers, and costs each published provider from its rate, per-transaction fee, monthly fee and platform fee. Commission we earn does not change the order.

When you need marketplace payments rather than a payment gateway

Is the money you collect yours to keep? If a customer pays you for your own goods or services, you need a payment gateway and nothing on this page applies. If part of what you collect belongs to someone else, a seller, a driver, a tutor, a landlord, you are running a platform, and the payout obligation is the whole problem.

You are buying four things: a split at the point of payment, somewhere to hold funds between the sale and the payout, identity checks on your sellers, and payouts that run without you.

Release money the moment the buyer pays and you have no protection against a refund, a chargeback or a job never done. Running a marketplace on a plain gateway and paying sellers by hand is how small platforms end up holding other people's money in their own float.

Payout timing: how fast marketplace payments reach your sellers

Providers on the same rails can pay sellers on different days, largely because they have made different choices about risk. Australia's New Payments Platform clears account-to-account transfers in near real time, and a provider that supports it can pay a seller the same day.

Three questions decide whether a schedule is flexible for you. Can you release a single payout on demand, or only run a batch? What is the hold on a new seller while the account builds history? And who wears the timing gap: pay a seller before the buyer's funds settle and the float and any reversal are yours.

Seller onboarding and KYC in marketplace payments

Every provider here verifies your sellers before it will pay them. Moving money to a third party brings anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer obligations into your signup flow. Sellers abandon signup at identity checks, so read this row as friction rather than as a tick.

Hosted means the provider's own screens collect the documents: faster to build, with somebody else's brand on the page. Embedded keeps the seller inside your product and moves the compliance work onto you.

Three Australian details. Capture the ABN at signup. Sole traders often trade under a business name that does not match their identity documents, which is a common reason a verification stalls. And nobody can be paid until verification clears, so onboarding sits on the critical path to launch.

Who holds the money: licences and structure in marketplace payments

In the facilitator model, the seller is the merchant. Your platform orchestrates the payment and takes a commission, and the provider onboards each seller as its own account. In the merchant of record model, your platform is the merchant: the buyer contracts with you and you pay sellers as suppliers afterwards. Simpler at checkout, heavier everywhere else, because chargebacks, refunds, consumer guarantees and tax obligations sit with you.

Two things to raise with your accountant early. The first is GST. As merchant of record you are making the supply. As a facilitator the seller usually is, but Australia's electronic distribution platform rules can shift GST liability for certain supplies onto the operator, so ask rather than assume. The second is who is authorised to hold the money. Handling funds on behalf of others is a financial service in Australia, and in practice a platform relies on its provider's authorisation.

Read that row as a fact about each provider's Australian standing, and get your own advice on what your model requires before launch. If you pay contractors doing cleaning, courier, road freight, IT or security work, ask whether the taxable payments annual report applies to you.

Fees, minimums and contracts in marketplace payments

Ordinary card processing is the base layer. The platform layer is charged separately, and what decides your unit economics is whose share it comes out of. When a payment splits, the fee can come from your commission or from the seller's proceeds, and that is normally yours to configure. Take it from the seller and your margin holds while their payout looks smaller. Absorb it and your take rate has to cover both sides.

A volume floor is an eligibility rule, not a price, and it can exclude an early-stage platform on its own. Contract shape matters too: re-plumbing seller accounts and payout logic is far harder than swapping a checkout, so a long agreement costs more to be wrong about.

Work through the questions in order, because the early ones eliminate more of the table: where your sellers get paid, whether you need to hold or settle in more than one currency, what payout promise you are making, and how much engineering you have. Then price it, and treat the first quote as an opening position.