How We Built Our Payment System with Stripe Connect

When we designed BookingXi's payment system, we needed to solve several problems at once: collect payments from customers, take a platform fee, handle sales tax, and pay out vendors — all automatically.

Why Stripe Connect

Stripe Connect is the industry standard for marketplace payments. It handles the complexity of multi-party transactions so we don't have to.

Destination Charges

We use destination charges — the simplest Connect model. When a customer pays:

1. The full amount goes to Stripe
2. We specify an application fee (our 5% platform cut)
3. The remainder is automatically transferred to the vendor's connected account
4. Stripe handles payout to the vendor's bank

Tax Handling

We use Stripe Tax with vendor-liable collection. The vendor is responsible for filing — we just calculate and collect the right amount at checkout.

Lessons Learned

• Always use webhooks for payment confirmation, never client-side redirects
• Handle edge cases: expired sessions, partial refunds, gift card + cash combos
• Build a transaction log from day one — you'll need it for reconciliation