We’re going to launch this app live. This means that multi-party financial transactions are going to be involved.
Most Apps have simple financial transactions. Users pay a fee in exchange for access. Multi-party transactions open up both technical and legal complexities that must be considered early on.
Most Startups would choose to be an intermediary. As in, the user pays the App, the App takes its cut and forwards the balance to the Third Party.
While SaaS Product can support this functionality, we’re not going to use it in this project for business reasons. By becoming an intermediary, we create an obligation to have customer support and we would need a business infrastructure capable of handling complaints, issues, refunds and problems.
In our case, this needs to be avoided because I’m not going to be creating an actual business around this App. Hotels, when they receive a booking, will be responsible for all customer support.
We will provide the frontend for processing payments, but the Hotels will need to provide their own API keys for processing payments. We will support Stripe, PayPal and Pay At Counter.
Next, we need to solve the problem of seamless customer support. Users will expect a Chat Feature that enables them to chat with the hotel. To provide it, we will create a "Chat To Email" feature that enables users to send Chat Messages through our App, but the hotel will receive and respond to them in email format.
We choose this approach because we need a solution that will work with any hotel. Every hotel will already be able to read and respond to emails, so this approach, while a little clunky, will work with every hotel.
Cancellation
When a user books through the app, they will need to contact the hotel directly for cancellations and refunds. Since the hotel is providing their own API keys for these transactions, we do not expose ourselves to any financial risks such as chargebacks or fraud. But it also means we’re going to need a way to securely store these API keys and inject them into the Payment Processing cycle at the appropriate time.