Merchant Aggregator Setup

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. These ecosystems aggregate merchants by providing valuable services that are dependent upon payments for their success. 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.

  1. Direct merchants that do not have complex requirements for organizing their payment data and/or further segmenting their business to manage reporting and enablement of value-add-services can continue to follow the standard Spreedly setup flow as outlined in the above sections.
  2. Merchant aggregators can take advantage of merchant registration capabilities that will help support the scale and specific needs that large platforms and their underlying merchants require, namely the ability to identify, report, and enable value-add-services for their individual merchants. Additional details for this setup and implementation can be found here.