Platform Settlement

Overview

Platforms integrating with Forage may choose one of the two ways that Forage is able to settle funds. The first way is for Forage to settle all funds from a transaction directly into the Merchant's account and offer reporting endpoints so that the Platform can settle with each of their Merchants at a later date. This is the default settlement schema that would be followed unless specified otherwise. The second way is to use our Platform Settlement flow of funds.

Platform Settlement

In the Platform Settlement flow of funds, the Platform tells Forage their percentage fee for each transaction and Forage settles funds directly with the Merchant and the Platform. For example, if the Platform were to have three Merchants live, each day they would receive three deposits into their Forage bank account with their percentage cut of the settled transactions for each Merchant.

Implementation

To use the Platform Settlement flow of funds, pass the platform_fee field when creating an Order (Custom or Fully Hosted integrations) or Payment (SDK integrations). platform_fee is a decimal between 0 and 1 representing the platform's percentage cut of each transaction (e.g., 0.05 for 5%). Both the Platform and Merchant must open a bank account with Forage, which can be done on the Forage Dashboard.

How fees interact with platform_fee

Forage charges a transaction processing fee on every transaction. That fee is taken off the full transaction amount first, then the platform's percentage is applied to what remains.

Worked example

A $100.00 SNAP purchase with platform_fee: 0.10 and a $3.00 Forage processing fee settles as follows:

Forage retains the $3.00 processing fee.

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Non-standard fee contracts

If your contract assigns Forage's processing fee entirely to the Merchant or entirely to the Platform, contact your Forage account team to confirm how settlement is calculated for your tenant.

Reporting

Both Merchants and Platforms can use our transaction and payout-based reporting endpoints for their own internal use. Each endpoint has a merchant_settlement_amount field and a platform_settlement_amount field corresponding to funds flowing to the Merchant and the Platform, respectively.