Hi HN,
I'm trying to build a service where I need to be the middleman and charge a customer on behalf of another merchant. Have any of you done something like that before? What's the best way to do it?
Should I be charging people, putting the money in my account and then making a separate transfer for the same amount to them?
Besides being a violation of their terms of service, it leaves a huge liability in your lap. If, as an example, you're taking payments on behalf of Person A and Person B who gave you money to give to Person A suddenly wants the money back that you gave to Person A, how do you handle the case where Person A is nowhere to be found? You're on the hook for that money and now, multiply that over the course of several instances of refunds and disappearances--it could be costly and problematic.
To mitigate this problem, PayPal introduced Adaptive Payments where you can have someone pay you and you share that payment with others. That's one way of dealing with it.
https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments
If you don't have to "touch" the money yourself, there's no problem.