Support marketplace settlement of a seller's negative Account balance

[jbrowning]

I'm planning a migration to the new Order,Account, and Settlement constructs and I'm considering the following payout/refund scenario. This is based on the documentation located here and here.

Seller

• Receiving payouts via a BankAccount.

Marketplace

• Supports payouts via BankAccount or CreditCard (push-to-card)
• Pays out to sellers in batch every other Friday

• Does not take a fee from purchases

  1. It's our regularly-scheduled bi-weekly payday so we loop through the seller's Orders and create a Credit for each one into the seller's Account.
  2. Create a Settlement for the Account which succeeds. Everything is awesome until a buyer demands a refund.
  3. Reverse the Credit to the Seller's Account associated with the buyer's Order. This results in an immediate successful restoration of the full amount_escrowed in the Order and a negative balance in the seller's Account.
  4. Refund the buyer's Debit.
  5. On our next payday, we attempt to create a Settlement to restore the seller's negative Account balance (we're assuming they haven't received any new Orders to restore their balance). This Settlement fails. This could be due to a number of reasons:
     • The seller has closed their bank account
     • Their bank account has insufficient funds
     • The seller has disappeared

  In any case I am now left with a seller's Account with a negative balance. I am not able to restore that balance to 0 because I may not be able to obtain a new BankAccount from my seller. Additionally, the seller may have switched to a new payout method (such as push-to-card) and no longer has an active BankAccount. In any case, I now need a new source of funds to cover the seller's negative Account balance.

This scenario is alluded to in @mjallday's comment here: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/pull/707#issuecomment-62575260 but, based on my back-and-forth with support, this flow does not seem to have been sufficiently resolved.

The solution that support has suggested is to create an new Debit against the Order with my marketplace BankAccount to fill the Order amount_escrowed and then create a Credit to bring the seller's Account balance back to 0. Remember, my marketplace does not take a transaction fee. This is a hack. This is not a scalable solution.

There was mention in #707 of https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api-private/issues/13 helping in this regard but I of course cannot see what that issue contains. :wink:

I propose an API which allows the marketplace to settle any seller negative Account balances.

[kyungmin]

@jbrowning Thanks for creating this issue. We are definitely aware of this scenario and happy to share our plan to allow marketplaces to add funds to orders. We are also interested in hearing your experience with Settlements so far. Would you be willing provide some early feedback over Google Hangouts?

[jbrowning]

@kyungmin I'd be glad to. You can find my contact info in support request #19918.