Spreedly Makes Dwolla an Option for E-Commerce Sites

Spreedly is partnering with Dwolla to let its merchant clients accept the alternative payments system.

The North Carolina cloud payment platform company — which connects merchants to roughly 30 different payment gateways, such as Authorize.Net or PayPal — will allow the businesses it supports to start taking Dwolla payments this week. A majority of Spreedly's customers are web developers.

A typical Spreedly client might be an online commerce vendor that wants to accept payment types beyond the traditional debit and credit cards. You can think about the company's technology as a highway that connects a company to many different payment gateways. Both companies plan to announce the deal on Wednesday.

"Dwolla is 25 cents a transaction, at that flat rate," versus the 3-5% that issuing banks get paid for card network transactions, says Justin Benson, Spreedly's chief executive. The two companies began talking about the collaboration a few months ago, he said.

Price was a main reason behind Spreedly's decision to support Dwolla transactions, Benson said.

Indeed, Dwolla is aiming to gain more adoption with its low cost.

The Des Moines company has even launched a bank-to-bank transfer system that promises to be as quick as a credit card transaction, yet as cheap as one that moves over the Automated Clearing House network. Already, Veridian Credit Union of Waterloo, Iowa, has begun offering customers mobile and online payments through FiSync.

Dwolla is also peddling its wares to programmers on its own.

Last month, in an effort to get more coders to begin incorporating its APIs into their payment applications, Dwolla sponsored a hackathon that focused on e-commerce.

The event awarded more than $20,000 in prizes and drew hundreds of coders.

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