Charity-giving marketplace with Stripe Connect split payments

The challenge

A US web agency brought us in to build the functionality behind its client's charity-giving marketplace. Independent stores lease space in an online mall on monthly plans, choose a nonprofit, and pledge a percentage of every sale to it. Regional growth strategists, linked to stores by zip code, earn commission on the lease payments they bring in.

A standard multi-seller store covers only part of this. Each payment had to be split in one flow between the seller and the chosen charity, with fees accounted for, while lease fees had to generate commission for the right rep. Charities also needed their own sign-up, profiles and visibility on the site.

What we did

• Marketplace foundation. We supplied and installed our own multi-seller extension for OpenCart, then extended it with seller categories, full addresses, company names, header images, tax classes, multi-category assignment, auto-approval of products and SEO-friendly URLs for seller and charity listings.
• Charity layer. A custom charity module covering registration and login, profiles with logos, banners and YouTube video, terms acceptance, and search by zip code, state, keyword and category. Later we added album and photo galleries for sellers and charities, with admin settings and approval.
• Stripe Connect split payments. A custom module lets sellers, charities and growth strategists connect their Stripe accounts. Payments are distributed using separate charges and transfers: sales pay the seller and send the donation (amount plus fee) to the charity, and lease payments generate the rep's commission. We worked through the one-to-many flow with the owner and configured the live redirect URLs and client ID.
• Recurring lease billing. Seller lease plans are created automatically in Stripe with configurable free-trial periods, plus a cancel-subscription option for sellers.
• Notifications. Rebuilt order emails so buyers see the donation amount and charity, charities receive a donation email with the seller's logo, and sellers see the charity details.
• Testing and fixes. Resolved Stripe live/test key errors, PHP notices, form issues and password-reset emails, and switched Stripe to live mode for launch.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 3, vQmod, Stripe Connect, Stripe Billing, YouTube embeds