What is a Merchant of Record?

In a sentence, a Merchant of Record (MoR) is the legal entity that sells goods and services to a customer. As a result, the Merchant of Record handles everything from checkout, payment and fraud to local compliance and tax requirements involved when selling globally. 

This is how it works from a legal perspective, in other words, the MoR is the intermediary that’s going to help pass title of the product from company ownership to the customer purchasing it. Since the MoR is responsible for the fulfillment and delivery of the products and services sold, they also take care of customer service in regards to the fulfillment of said products.

Pains expanding globally:

When merchants execute international expansion, there are many considerations that can drastically affect performance outcomes. One important consideration is acceptance rates when taking payments, for example whether or not your banking infrastructure has a local card acquiring bank set up where your end-customer is purchasing from. With a MoR, you can leverage an extensive banking infrastructure network, to then act as if you have a local virtual bank to communicate with the end-customer’s bank, thereby localizing your payments and ensuring higher acceptance rates. 

Other considerations when operating and selling globally include:

• Taxes and changing rules
• Payments and shopper expectation in a global landscape
• Fraud across countries
• Compliance, screening etc.
• Finance, reconciliation, multi-currency etc.

So, how does a MoR differ from a Payment Service Provider?

A MoR model instantly taps into the global capabilities you need (fraud, compliance, tax, payments), while also handling all merchant responsibilities behind the scenes, so there are no investments needed in the back office or any need to take on additional risk on the vendor side. 

Many PSPs have very good coverage and effective solutions for processing payments, however it is near impossible for them to have top class solutions globally. MoRs gets you access to multiple acquiring and processing partners to tell where to send payments for the highest possible acceptance rates. In addition, asknet’s MoR solutions offer dedicated customer support to optimize your growth through 20+ years helping ecommerce businesses sell globally. 

Conclusion

If you would like to find out more about how a Merchant of Record can support your global expansion, asknet ecommerce GmbH has 25 years of experience as a global MoR provider, delivering customized solutions for leading software companies.

Get in contact with asknet eCS to learn more.