Rails Marketplace Payment Processing

I have a client who recently changed the scope of a project I was building for them, to a marketplace.

Previously users had to pay a nominal fee to register for the site...I was handling credit card transactions using Active Merchant.

For the marketplace that they now want to build they want to build a simple escrow-type system...the payment to the seller gets released w开发者_开发知识库hen the buyer receives the product.

This will be difficult for several reasons:

1. How will the system be able to determine when the item has been received? The receiver could simply lie about it. I know paypal does something similar, but they use the tracking number from the shipping company to determine this.
2. How do I go about depositing payments in the sellers account? It's easy to process the payment from the buyer, but how do I get this money to the seller?

For #2 I was thinking it might be possible to use some sort of paypal account to handle this...I haven't looked into any specifics yet. Any idea where to start?

Paypal may be able to handle #1 as well, if I am lucky.

Any suggestions?

We used PayPal Adaptive Payments for #2... still hunting for a solution to facilitate the transaction between User A and User B with the marketplace taking a %...

Would love to hear more answers!

In regards to #1 - I'd require some sort of signed receipt on delivery. That would depend on the value of the goods, at the lower range tracking receipt + some sort of reputation system to remove people who abuse the system has worked for me in the past.

In regards to #2, disbursements; I'd recommend you look at our product Balanced. It's built to solve exactly this problem so I think it's a good match.

Balanced will allow you to collect funds into an escrow account and then disburse the funds as a separate action which allows you to split the funds up or group them together as required. Payouts are done via next-day ACH (US only) but we're building out international support.

Balanced has an excellent ruby gem since you're building in Rails and there's an ActiveMerchant plugin if that's what you are/have integrated with.