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You create lots of host accounts, or just buy them and change the attached bank accounts. This at least used to be very easy. For many this can be better than

You create lots of host accounts, or just buy them and change the attached bank accounts. This at least used to be very easy. For many this can be better than e.g. Stripe because AirBnB supports payouts to far more countries, making it easier to get lots of drop accounts. They even do WU in some countries. I would also expect AirBnB to be slower to act on chargebacks than Stripe & Co. I wouldn't expect this to be super scalable, but on the other hand while a few million a month is nothing for AirBnB it is an OK amount even when split across 100 eastern european guys.

danso 9y ago
> For many this can be better than e.g. Stripe because AirBnB supports payouts to far more countries This is a bit OT, but I looked up the Airbnb page to see what they accept: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/126/what-methods-of-payment-does-airbnb-accept https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/126/what-methods-of-paym... I had thought that the general solution for handling worldwide payments was to use Paypal. How does Airbnb facilitate the handling of all these different kind of payment services? Is it a homegrown solution? Or is it not really a major technical problem for services to implement this on their own?
- huac 9y ago
  built in house https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-airbnbs-payment-platform-43ebfc99b324 https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-airbnbs-paymen...
- toast0 9y ago
  PayPal is a US centric general solution for handling worldwide payments. It kind of works worldwide, but is painful/inconvenient for many in some countries. If those countries are major sources of business, it's probably worth making it easier for the customers to spend money. Payment processing is a pain, but it's not that hard to integrate, maybe a few weeks of dedicated engineering plus ocassional maintenance and an account rep to deal with issues/problematic payments. This is big when you're a small company and getting paid is clearly important, but not a central focus of your product; it's not so big when you've got thousands of employees and brokering payments is a key part of your business.

danso 9y ago

> For many this can be better than e.g. Stripe because AirBnB supports payouts to far more countries This is a bit OT, but I looked up the Airbnb page to see what they accept: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/126/what-methods-of-payment-does-airbnb-accept https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/126/what-methods-of-paym... I had thought that the general solution for handling worldwide payments was to use Paypal. How does Airbnb facilitate the handling of all these different kind of payment services? Is it a homegrown solution? Or is it not really a major technical problem for services to implement this on their own?

huac 9y ago
built in house https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-airbnbs-payment-platform-43ebfc99b324 https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-airbnbs-paymen...
toast0 9y ago
PayPal is a US centric general solution for handling worldwide payments. It kind of works worldwide, but is painful/inconvenient for many in some countries. If those countries are major sources of business, it's probably worth making it easier for the customers to spend money. Payment processing is a pain, but it's not that hard to integrate, maybe a few weeks of dedicated engineering plus ocassional maintenance and an account rep to deal with issues/problematic payments. This is big when you're a small company and getting paid is clearly important, but not a central focus of your product; it's not so big when you've got thousands of employees and brokering payments is a key part of your business.