Understand its limitations

If you want to sell in Europe you need 3DS2 and to avoid being caught by the UK Employment Rights Act s36 – so you need your vendors to be the Merchant of Record. That means you cannot use Separate Charges and Transfers – because that makes you, the platform, the Merchant of Record.
Instead you need to use Stripe’s Direct Charges model.
Dokan will not do that.
Dokan ‘senior engineers’ will do everything they can to avoid telling you this – which either means they don’t understand their own software, or that they’ve more interested in sales than in helping you.
But eventually, if you waste enough of your time and theirs, they will say.
Dokan cannot support BOTH direct charges and 3DS2.
Which makes it unfit for selling from the UK (unless you want to take a huge regulatory risk!) and much of Europe – and likely other jurisdictions as their rules ‘catch up’.

In the context of the Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA 2025) and its “Section 36” expansion, the choice between Stripe’s payment models is no longer just a technical or financial decision—it is a regulatory one.

Section 36 essentially states that if a platform “participates in the arrangements” for labor (services), it can be classified as an Employment Business. Your payment flow is one of the most visible “fingerprints” of that participation.

1. Separate Charges and Transfers (SCT)

The “Control” Model

In this flow, the customer pays your platform directly. You then “transfer” a portion of that money to the vendor/worker later.

• How it works: You are the Merchant of Record. The money lands in your Stripe balance first, and you trigger the transfer to the vendor (often via transfer_group).
• ERA 2025 Risk:HIGH.
  • Indicative of Control: By holding the funds, you are seen as the “paymaster.” Section 36 specifically looks at platforms that handle the financial transaction as evidence of being an employment business.
  • VAT Liability: In many service sectors, this model forces the platform to be the “deemed supplier,” meaning you must account for 20% VAT on the full transaction, not just your commission.

• This topic was modified 1 week, 6 days ago by markfme.