A buyer, a car and five ways to pay
Picture a buyer in Miami looking at a $700,000 car on a dealer's site in Los Angeles. They'd pay by bank wire. The next buyer wants to use a card for the deposit. The one after that holds RLUSD and asks why they can't just send it.
Most dealer sites can't say yes to all three. They send the buyer to a phone call, a PDF of bank details and a week of back and forth. We set out to build the store that says yes, and this is how it went.
What xMerch is
xMerch gives sellers their own online store: merch, tickets, services, live auctions and giveaways, on their own subdomain or domain. Buyers pay with whatever they have, and xMerch pays each seller automatically.
A dealer store puts it all on one page. Cars sell at a set price, others go to live auction, and a giveaway runs alongside where every order earns entries.
- Card, Apple Pay and Cash App
- Bank wires at checkout, with the bank details on screen
- XRP and RLUSD on the XRP Ledger, and XAH on Xahau, signed in Xaman
- Automatic payouts to the seller, with the platform fee kept at checkout
The first surprise: RLUSD isn't one token
On the XRP Ledger, a token is a currency code plus the account that issues it. Anyone can create a token called RLUSD, and a payment in a fake one still shows as successful on the ledger.
So checkout never trusts the name. It accepts RLUSD only from Ripple's issuer, checks the exact amount delivered against what was asked, and refuses partial payments, a ledger feature that lets a payment deliver less than its stated amount. Our first mainnet order settled exactly as planned, and the seller was paid automatically in the same flow.
The second: a wire takes days
Cards settle in seconds. A wire can take two business days, and while it travels the car has to be held for that buyer. If holding a car were free, anyone could lock up a dealer's inventory without paying.
Now a wire starts with a small card hold: 5% of the order, at least $500 and at most $7,500. Only then does the car show Sale pending. When the wire arrives in full, the hold is released and the buyer is never charged twice. If it doesn't, the deposit covers the dealer's lost time.
The third: two buyers, one car
A one-of-one car can't be sold twice. But a buyer can open a card checkout, walk away, and come back to a tab that's still payable after someone else has started a wire.
A wire now refuses a car that another buyer started paying for in the last few minutes, cancels older open card checkouts for it, and wallet payment requests expire in 10 minutes.
The fourth: banks take holidays
Our first wire deadline skipped weekends but not bank holidays. A wire started on the Monday before Veterans Day would have been due on a day the Federal Reserve is closed, and expired before it could arrive.
Deadlines now follow the Federal Reserve holiday calendar, computed from its rules, so it never needs a yearly update.
Closing the loop: getting the car home
Payment is only half of a car sale. The car still has to cross the country, and the dealer shouldn't be paid until it's moving. So the last piece is transport, built into the same checkout. Here's the full cycle:
- The buyer picks open or enclosed transport at checkout and sees its price in the order total
- They pay for the car and the transport together, by card, wire or wallet
- Transport is booked with a licensed carrier as soon as the payment clears
- Pickup, in-transit and delivery updates arrive automatically and show on the buyer's order
- The dealer's payout is released when the car is picked up and on its way
Where it stands
Payments, deposits and held payouts are live. Transport quotes and booking run through a carrier network's API, and the tracking updates are the last step: they go live once that integration is confirmed. A forfeited deposit's dealer share already waits 30 days and a set of fraud checks, so a disputed card can't be cashed out first.
Every store gets these payments the day it opens. You can see a dealer store at autohaus.xmerch.app.