Fondy marketplace payments: overview of key features

Your marketplace payment provider affects everything from how efficient transactions are to how reliable users perceive your platform to be. That’s why choosing the right payment partner is a key decision in your early stages as a marketplace founder.

Fondy can be a great alternative for many Europe or UK-based platforms—but is it the right choice for yours? In this guide, we’ll go over Fondy’s key marketplace payment features to help you make an informed choice.

Key points in this article:

• Background information on Fondy: Founders, competitors, and popular marketplaces using Fondy.
• Fondy’s key features: Fondy's pricing, countries and currencies, key payment flow features, and security tools.
• Fondy’s pricing some notes on their customer support and ease of integration.

Fondy was founded in 2019 by Valeria Vahorovska and is headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It has grown into a trusted fintech platform for marketplace payments, serving over 20,000 merchants and handling millions of transactions monthly.

Fondy’s main product, Fondy Flow, is a payment solution designed specifically for platforms and marketplaces. 

There are hundreds of payment provider companies out there, and even if you strictly look at those with a dedicated marketplace offering (which is our recommendation), you can easily find dozens of companies to compare.

To make the task easier, we’ve written overview articles (similar to this one) on the following Fondy competitors:

• Stripe Connect
• Mangopay
• Adyen for Platforms
• PayPal for Marketplaces
• Trustap
• Ryft

Check out these overviews to learn and compare each provider’s strengths and features and choose the one that best suits your business needs.

While Stripe Connect is the only payment provider available out of the box with Sharetribe’s marketplace builder, you can integrate any third-party provider, including Fondy, through custom development.

Fondy doesn’t disclose most of its clients publicly, but they do have one major public partnership: Glovo, and international food delivery marketplace serving customers in over 25 countries.

All payment providers have their pros and cons, and the right choice for you always depends on your specific goals, resources, location, and several other factors.

Fondy’s clear advantage is that offers all the key marketplace payment functionality at a competitive price. In our discussion with Fondy, they highlighted their transparent pricing, easy integration, and dedicated support as their core benefits for early-stage marketplace founders. While we don’t have first-hand experience working with them, a stated focus on startups and an understanding of the limitations of early-stage platforms is promising. 

A key limitation is Fondy’s geographical focus—payouts can only be made to sellers in Europe and the UK. If this is not a limitation for your concept, Fondy can be a payment partner worth considering.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the features Fondy offers marketplaces. 

When choosing the payment provider for your marketplace, the very first thing to check is whether your target locations are supported. This means ensuring the payment provider enables you to:

• Pay sellers in your target countries
• Handle the currencies your customers use
• Handle the payment methods your target audience wants to use.

These three things are essential for your payment system to work smoothly for everyone. 

Fondy is available to customers from over 200 locations: all countries where Visa and MasterCard cards are issued, which is about 210 countries of the world.

These include:

• US
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• New Zeland
• France 
• Germany
• Ireland
• Poland
• And more. (See the full list of Fondy’s supported countries here.)

Meanwhile, note that supported countries are not the same as payout countries. Payout countries are regions where sellers can receive their earnings. Fondy allows instant payouts to bank accounts and cards in the 30+ countries where it fully operates: European countries and the UK.

Fondy supports over 150 currencies, including:

• GBP
• EUR
• USD
• PLN
• HUF
• CZK
• RON
• BGN
• HRK
• And more. (Check the complete list of Fondy’s currency support here)

Fondy also provides multi-currency acceptance and settlement to ensure your users can process transactions in one currency and settle in another. This is particularly valuable if your marketplace is operating across borders, as it simplifies payments for buyers and sellers.

The payment methods your customers prefer may depend on your marketplace type—for example, peer-to-peer fashion marketplaces might need different payment options than B2B hiring platforms.

Your location can also play a role. For instance, European customers often prefer local methods like iDEAL in the Netherlands or Sofort in Germany. Credit cards and digital wallets like Apple Pay are more common in the U.S. If you don't offer these choices, you could lose potential sales.

Fondy supports a wide range of local and international payment options, including:

• Credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Maestro)
• Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal)
• BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later)
• Local options like iDEAL (Netherlands) and Sofort (Germany)

Fondy generally supports many local payment methods in different countries. However, the availability of these local methods may also vary by country. The full list of supported payment methods is available here.

Most marketplaces monetize with commission: the platform takes a cut out of each transaction it facilitates. From the point of view of marketplace payment functionality, this requires a feature that lets the platform split the payment from a customer between the platform and the seller.

Split payments are a key reason why we recommend marketplace founders choose a payment provider that specializes in marketplaces. Without this feature, you may not be able to charge a commission at all, or at least not in a way that complies with online payment regulations.

Fondy has a split payment feature that lets marketplaces automatically.

Fondy also offers a flexible setting for split payment. You can set rules to divide payments between multiple parties so everyone gets their share appropriately and simultaneously. This means Fondy, unlike many of its competitors, supports building a multi-vendor shopping cart. 

Delayed payouts (sometimes called escrow) let marketplaces hold funds temporarily until certain conditions, like order delivery or service completion, are met. The payment will be released to the seller only once these conditions are fulfilled. 

This helps reduce the risk of fraud or disputes, ensuring both parties are protected.

Delayed payouts is another marketplace-specific feature that many generic payment providers don’t support. Even within marketplace payment providers, there’s lots of variability in how delayed payouts work and how long delays can be built into the marketplace payment flow.

Fondy’s delayed payout & escrow features include:

• Instant and delayed payouts with flexible scheduling options.
• Escrow support with no limits on how long funds can be held.
• Automated and customizable payouts to match your marketplace’s needs.

Subscription payments might be a consideration for marketplaces in two different scenarios:

• You monetize your marketplace through subscriptions, meaning your users pay a recurring fee for access to your platform.
• Your sellers offer subscription services, and you need to let them collect a recurring fee from their customers and charge your commission from those fees.

Fondy supports both these scenarios. You can use this feature to:

• Charge regular fees from users for platform access, memberships, or premium content.
• Enable sellers to offer subscription-based services like product subscriptions, recurring deliveries, or ongoing services. 
• Set flexible billing cycles to accommodate weekly, monthly, or custom schedules based on your needs.

Fondy automatically deducts platform fees or commissions during these transactions to save time and reduce manual work.

Marketplaces store personal data and handle online payments. Both these areas are heavily regulated, and the regulation tends to change and evolve. To add to the complexity, the details of online payment and data security regulation differ between countries and regions.

If you can outsource some of your regulatory compliance concerns to your technical partners, that can mean a lot of time saved and peace of mind gained.

Highlights from Fondy’s payment security offering include:

• KYC/KYB (Know-your-customer/Know-your-business) support: Automated onboarding and verification for sellers with KYC/KYB and AML checks for individuals and businesses, with local language support
• 3D Secure 2 Support to enhance security for card transactions.
• Regulatory compliance with PSD2 and GDPR regulations in the EU
• PCI DSS Level 1 certified for payment security.
• Cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability and reliability.

You can read about Fondy's security measures on this page.

As a marketplace owner, your local tax authorities might require you to submit information about your sellers annually. For example, most EU marketplaces are required to report on seller data yearly under the DAC7 directive. In the US, these “marketplace facilitator laws” vary by state.

Furthermore, if your sellers are professional and get a big part of their income through your platform, they might require more detailed information from you to support their own tax reporting.

Because of the varying needs of different users and lots of local nuances in the regulation, this is a complicated requirement that no payment provider meets perfectly. 

However, Fondy offers lots of helpful reporting features for both marketplace operators and sellers. For marketplace operators, Fondy provides:

• A real-time analytics dashboard to track transactions and revenue in detail.
• Customizable reports and export options to simplify financial tracking and share data for tax and accounting purposes.

For sellers, Fondy ensures transparency by offering:

• Access to transaction histories to review payments and earnings.
• Detailed payout reports to make tax preparation easier.

Pricing is naturally a key consideration when choosing a marketplace payment provider. The quality of support and integration they offer is also important—especially for small teams with limited development resources.

In pricing, Fondy stands out from many of its competitors. Fondy’s transaction fees start at 0.7% + £0.20 per transaction. This is compared to PayPal's higher rates of 3.49% + $0.09, Stripe’s 1.5% + €0.25 (in the EAA), and Mangopay’s 1.4% + €0.25.

However, similarly to its competitors, Fondy's fees may vary depending on the country and payment method used. For instance, they charge 0.9% + £0.20 instead of 0.7% on cards and digital wallet payments.

There are no setup or monthly charges, except for Virtual IBANs, which start at £10 per month. 

For payouts, Fondy charges:

• £0.20 per payout transaction
• From 0.4% on payout volume
• From 0.25% for balance transfers

There are also some additional fees to consider:

• Currency conversion fees may apply when processing payments in different currencies.
• Chargeback fees could be incurred in cases of payment disputes.

Overall, Fondy is a cost-effective option for early-stage marketplaces, especially compared to larger-scale competitors PayPal, Stripe, and Adyen. (Fondy has published its own pricing comparison here.)

Sharetribe doesn’t offer a pre-built Fondy integration (only Stripe is available out of the box), but it’s possible to build a custom integration with any third-party payment gateway. 

While none of our customers have integrated Fondy into their platforms yet, we spoke with Fondy representatives to understand more about their approach. 

Integration to Fondy happens via their APIs with the help of several SDKs and plugins. IN our discussion Fondy highlighted the ease of integration and quality of customer support core value propositions. Their documentation is extensive and clear. Technical support is available during integration and they assign their customers a dedicated account manager.

It’s likely a good idea to contact the customer support of all the payment provider companies you’re considering closely, to get a feel for how it is to work with them.

Fondy was founded in 2019, and since then has grown into a payment provider worth considering for marketplaces operating in the EU and UK. It offers all the key marketplace features at a very competitive price and supports even complex flows like multi-vendor shopping carts and splitting payments from recurring payments.

A key drawback is Fondy’s geographical availability: your providers need to be located in the EU or UK. If this is not a limitation, Fondy could be well worth a closer look.

Thank you to Nazar Yankovych from Fondy for contributing the key facts about Fondy's offering.