Articles ·
Open banking or card: how your customers should pay you
Two of our builds made opposite choices. Why BOOKaTRADE takes no cards at all, why vBuy takes both, and what taking payments means for your site.
If your website is going to take money, the first real decision is how your customers pay. Two platforms we built answer that question in opposite ways. BOOKaTRADE takes no card payments at all. vBuy is built to take open banking and cards side by side. Both are right, and the reason is the size of the payment and what happens if it is reversed.
Two ways to pay
- Open banking. The customer approves the payment in their own banking app, and the money moves straight from their bank account. BOOKaTRADE does this through Online Payments Platform (OPP), and vBuy through Trilo.
- Card. The familiar route at a checkout. vBuy takes cards through Stripe.
Why BOOKaTRADE takes no cards
BOOKaTRADE holds a homeowner’s money in escrow and releases it to the tradesperson stage by stage, as each stage of work is signed off. The sums involved in home improvement work are large, and on sums like those open banking costs a fraction of card fees, so the difference goes to the tradesperson rather than to a payment processor.
The bigger reason is chargebacks. A card payment can be disputed and reversed through the card provider, and on job values this size a chargeback could reverse a payment weeks after the tradesperson has been paid. So open banking is the default, and anyone who can’t use it pays by bank transfer instead.
Why vBuy takes both
vBuy is a shop. Its customers are buying everyday products, not paying for building work. Asking every shopper to change how they pay at the moment they are ready to buy is a poor trade, so card stays available alongside open banking.
The part nobody sees: the record
Taking the money is the easy half. The hard half is knowing, at any moment, whose money it is. On BOOKaTRADE every movement of money writes a row in a ledger, so a tradesperson’s balance is always the sum of what they have genuinely earned. The fee is locked at the moment it was applied, so history never rewrites itself. vBuy works the same way: its rewards currency is only worth trusting because the ledger behind it is exact.
For a smaller business the principle scales down. Whichever way a customer pays, the payment should end up in one record you can check.
What it means for your site
A website that takes enquiries sits in our website band, from £500. Once customers pay you online, it is a web application, from £2,000, and card payments and invoicing are part of that band. Escrow and split payments like BOOKaTRADE’s belong to our flagship platforms, from £10,000.
Technology advice is included at every level, so which way your customers pay (card, open banking or both) is settled in discovery, before you commit to the build.
Before you pay for the build
For a web application, discovery comes first, for a fixed fee of £400 that is credited in full against the build if you go ahead. If you don’t, the written specification is yours to take to any developer. Then you click through a working prototype before you pay for the build. If it is not right, you walk away.