Marketplaces and Payments: Unlocking Growth with Ansa

Marketplaces have become the backbone of modern commerce, connecting buyers and sellers across every category—from handmade crafts to enterprise procurement. But behind the scenes, marketplace operators face a unique set of challenges: paying sellers efficiently, keeping buyers engaged, and managing the costs of payments at scale.

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In this post, we’ll walk through the different types of marketplaces and highlight common use cases that operators need to solve—from payouts to refunds to loyalty. We’ll also show how Ansa helps marketplaces streamline payments, lower transaction costs, and unlock new ways to drive retention with stored value wallets and incentives.

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Types of marketplaces

From your local farmer to the largest retail platforms on earth, marketplaces are increasingly the way consumers find the goods they want, and merchants find the consumers they need. Let’s take a minute to talk about the types of marketplaces this blog will be useful for:

• P2P (Peer-to-Peer): A P2P marketplace connects individual buyers and sellers directly, like neighbors trading online. The platform facilitates trust, payments, and discovery, but the transactions themselves are between people rather than businesses. Examples: eBay, Craigslist, Poshmark.
• Reseller (Consignment): In a consignment model, sellers list their items, but the marketplace manages pricing, merchandising, or fulfillment. The seller gets paid once the item sells, while the marketplace earns a commission for handling the transaction. Examples: The RealReal, GearTrade, ThredUp.
• B2B (Business-to-Business): A B2B marketplace brings together companies instead of individuals, helping businesses source products, services, or suppliers more efficiently. Think of it as a digital trade show floor where enterprises can connect and transact. Examples: Alibaba, ThomasNet, Faire.
• Physical goods: These marketplaces enable buyers and sellers to exchange tangible products that need shipping or pickup. Examples range from fashion resale sites to platforms for home goods or electronics. Examples: Amazon, Etsy, StockX.
• Digital goods: Digital marketplaces focus on products delivered instantly online—like software, e-books, templates, or NFTs. Since there’s no shipping involved, the emphasis is on secure delivery and licensing. Examples: Steam, Envato Market.

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Representative use cases

• Seller payouts: Regardless of the type of marketplace you’re running, sellers need to be paid out when they make a sale. Paying sellers can be expensive, and just as importantly, sending proceeds off-platform reduces the chances they’ll come back and spend with you again. Offering payouts into a stored value wallet kickstarts the flywheel of sellers becoming buyers.
• Incentives for buyers: As your ecosystem grows, so does competition for your buyers’ attention. Ansa offers incentive tooling to help you keep buyers coming back. Incentives include bonus funds for wallet loads, wallet drops to seed balances, cash back on wallet spend, and promo codes redeemable for balance. Already have your own incentive logic? Use our APIs to fund wallet balances directly.
• Refunds to balance: When buyers request refunds, sending funds back to a credit card takes days, incurs processing fees, and does nothing to encourage future spending on your platform. Instead, instant refunds to a stored value wallet increase both retention and revenue by keeping funds circulating within your marketplace.
• Save money on transactions: Marketplaces face double payment processing fees: once when the buyer pays, and again when the seller is paid out. For platforms with a high overlap of buyers and sellers, this is a major cost center. Each purchase funded by wallet balance and each payout made to wallet balance eliminates external payment fees—savings that can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars per month. For example, a marketplace with $1M in sales at a $25 AOV and 50% buyer-seller overlap could save more than $15,000 per month.

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Have an additional use case in mind? We love to solution with folks! Just share your information in this form and one of our specialists will reach out.

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How Ansa works for marketplaces

So, how does it work? When a purchase is made, the marketplace sends the details of that purchase to the Ansa platform via API. Ansa decreases the buyer’s balance, increases the seller’s balance, and sets aside the marketplace’s share—all in a single API call. These flows can happen synchronously, or after your risk team clears the transaction.

Your customers only see their spendable balance, but under the hood, a lot is happening: funding sources, incentive rules, and settlement logic all drive that simple wallet balance.

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Why Ansa works for marketplaces

• Compliant: Storing funds on behalf of your users is complex from a regulatory standpoint. Banks offering access to funding sources like stored value wallets are required to meet certain regulations and filing requirements on a quarterly and yearly basis in order to offer these services. Additionally, programs must provide proof of comprehensive risk and AML checks and adherence to wallet activity monitoring requirements. This is often (much) more than a marketplace team wants to take on in-house. So, Ansa offers a fully compliant solution on your behalf.
• Advanced Ledgering: One of the hardest parts of creating a stored value program is keeping track of the funds. You need to know where each dollar in the program came from, where it went, and how to put it back if you need to. Not only do you need real time accurate access to spendable balances for every user, you also have to know which of those balances were funded by incentives (you don’t want to allow sellers to cash out incentive dollars!), which funds were spent and when (an incentive dollar spent has a different effect on accounting than a customer funded dollar), when funds expire (otherwise they are just an infinite liability on your books) and which of these funds are actually your revenue. A purpose-built, dual entry immutable multi-currency ledger, (like Ansa) is crucial to the success of your program.
• On-us transactions: Transactions which move money across the Ansa platform avoid costly credit card processing fees, drastically lowering your cost of payment acceptance, and put you in control of the flow of your funds. Ansa tracks each wallet balance and knows which funds are available for settlement to the marketplace.
• Incentive Engine: Chances are, you have a KPI that tracks how many sellers and buyers you retain, and how much revenue you’re able to drive from those users. Loyalty programs work to drive these metrics, but building a program is expensive and time consuming. That’s why so many marketplaces depend on marketing and UX to carry the weight of their retention KPIs. Ansa’s Incentive Engine lets you start with a loyalty program on day one, with no additional implementation needed.  Incentives types include bonus funds for loading wallet balance, wallet drops to seed funds into user wallets, cash back on wallet spend and promo codes that can be redeemed for balance. If you want to experiment with your own logic, you can divvy out incentive dollars using the Ansa API as well.

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Additionally, we've built in the flexibility to work with your system.

• Customization options:
  • Customer segmentation: Create wallet- and transaction-based segments, or sync your CRM segments to Ansa via API for personalized campaigns.
  • UX control: As an API-first platform, Ansa lets you design wallet balance displays, incentive messages, and expiring funds alerts in your own style.
  • Incentive flexibility: Use our no-code tools or APIs to build campaigns with expiring or non-expiring incentive dollars.
• Integrations:
  • Bring your own PSP: Use your existing PSP relationships and stored payment methods. Ansa connects to your PSP to fund wallets, manage refunds, and handle disputes.
  • ERP systems: Map transaction types to accounts and let Ansa automate journal entries.
  • Klaviyo: Sync Ansa wallet data to Klaviyo for targeted outreach and campaigns.

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Conclusion

Whether you’re building a peer-to-peer community, scaling a B2B platform, or selling digital goods, the way money moves on your marketplace has a direct impact on growth. With Ansa, you can simplify complex payment flows, reduce costs, and turn transactions into opportunities to keep buyers and sellers engaged.

If you’re ready to explore how a stored value wallet and incentive engine can work for your marketplace, our team would love to show you what’s possible.