Stripe - delaying transfers in a marketplace app

Question

I'm building a marketplace app. I'm using Stripe to accept buyer payments and transfer a percentage to the seller. However, stripe only let's you transfer from your stripe balance. So if I accept a buyer payment that takes 2 business days to show up in my stripe balance, I can't transfer payment as a sale occurs. I get an insufficient balance error from Stripe.

Is there a way to delay the transfer by say 3 days so the transfer is initiated after the buyer payment clears? I want to queue up transfers automatically rather than manually initiate each sellers transfer.

Is this possible or is the only option for me to pay out of my pocket by funding my stripe balance while waiting for the charges to clear?

Answer 1

There's no way to delay the transfer via the API. Besides funding your account, I think your best bet is to just do this delay on your end.

The easiest way would be to just make a table in your database that describes the transfer to make, and the date/time to make it, then run a cronjob that finds transfers that should be made and perform them (and mark them as paid or delete the record).