Merchant onboarding
Merchant of record vs Merchant aggregator
Spreedly supports multiple customer business models, including direct merchants of record and merchant aggregators. A merchant of record (MoR) is an organization that sells goods or services directly to consumers or businesses in exchange for currency and they receive the funds to their bank account. The MoR is the entity that is authorized and held liable by a financial institution to process a consumer’s transactions.
Merchant aggregators or platforms represent business models that create value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups. Merchant aggregators can include digital platforms like delivery and order ahead services, eCommerce B2B2C platforms, and industry-specific business management solutions. The underlying merchants of a platform often serve as the merchant of record (MoR). In this case, the aggregator is often the non-MoR that is facilitating its merchant partners to sell to downstream consumers or customers while providing payment and non-payment services on behalf of their merchants.
Spreedly’s registration services allows merchant aggregators and direct merchants to formally identify atomic units (e.g. individual merchants within a platform) or logical segments (e.g. geography) of their business which provides:
- The ability to enable, track, and monetize value-add-services (VAS) on those individual segments.
- Track payment method transactional volume and reporting metrics on a per-merchant or segment basis.
Recommendations for environment setup
| Options | Benefits | Considerations |
|---|---|---|
| Use a top-level organization that can be associated to 1:N environments. A separate environment is created for each sub-merchant or business segment. | Enable, monitor and report on VAS's on a per-merchant / segment basis. | Payment Method tokens are created and vaulted at the environment level and unique to that environment; tokens are not shared between environments. |
| Use a top-level organization with a single environment for all sub-merchants / business segments. | Payment methods can be shared across sub-merchants / business segments. | Flexibility for VAS enablement and reporting is limited within a single environment. Generally all services are applied to the entire merchant base, with some exceptions at the card level. Transactional reporting is available when using the sub_merchant object. |
Sample organizational structure
Note: Merchant in the above diagram can be replaced by any business segment.
Updated 6 months ago
Once you have a Spreedly account and are ready to get started, follow our implementation guides.