What is a merchant?

Merchant

A merchant refers to the actual business that this legal entity owns.

Legal Entity vs Merchant
A legal entity is an association, corporation, partnership, proprietorship, trust, or individual that has the legal capacity to enter into agreements or contracts, assume obligations, incur and pay debts, sue and be sued in its own right, and to be held responsible for its actions.

For most small or medium sized businesses there won't be much of a distinction between the legal entity and the merchant. The distinction comes when there is a legal entity that operates several different businesses that in this case would be referred to as merchants. Nevertheless both the legal entity and merchant information needs to be provided for verification purposes.

Additional Information

Bank Verification
Adding a merchant bank will initiate a two drop deposit. The customer will need to check their bank account records for these two amounts and proceed to the bank verification process.

Statement Descriptors
Pay special attention to the statementDescriptor. Statement descriptors show up on a Payer's bank account statement next to their purchase. Selecting an appropriate statement descriptor can help to make sure the payer remembers the purchase and does not attempt to Dispute the charges later. Allowable characters are 0-9, a-z, A-Z, &, *, #, ., ,, and whitespace .

Merchant Category Code
Make sure you send merchantCategoryCode if the plan requires professional validation.
If you are in a country that does not use MCCs (e.g. Mexico), do not include this attribute.

Documentation

Request

Parameter	Specification
businessName	Type: String Length: 1-256 The name of the business.
businessUrl	Type: String Length: 1-128 The URL for the business's website.
businessLogo	Type: String Length 1-128 The URL for the business's logo.
supportEmail	Type: String Length 1-128 The support email for the business.
supportPhone	Type: String Length 1-16 The support phone number for the business.
supportUrl	Type: String Length 1-128 The URL to reach the support website for the business.
productDescription	Type String Length 1-512 A description of the business's product.
statementDescriptor	Type: String Length: 1-20 Valid Characters: [0-9, a-z, A-Z, &, *, #, period, comma, and space] The statement descriptor that will show up on a payer's bank statement when processing through your Paystand network.
defaultCurrency	Type: String Format ISO4217 currency code The default currency that will be set for this customer.
merchantCategoryCode	Type: String Length: 4-7 This should be a string of integers 4-7 characters IRS, Visa MCC is used to classify a business by the type of goods or services it provides.
bank	Type: JSON Object Bank The bank account information for this merchant.
businessAddress	Type: JSON Object Address The address for this business.
personalContact	Type: JSON Object Contact The personal contact for this business.

Response

All of the request parameters will be returned in the response.

Example

Merchant request

{
  "merchant": {
    "businessName": "Pearl SeaBass Inc",
    "businessUrl": "https://www.theseabassfrancis.com",
    "businessLogo": "https://www.theseabassfrancis.com/images/logo.png",
    "supportEmail": "[email protected]",
    "supportUrl": "https://support.pearl.com",
    "productDescription": "Seabass product description",
    "statementDescriptor": "Pearl Inc.",
    "defaultCurrency": "USD",
    "merchantCategoryCode": "4816",
    "bank": {..},
    "personalAddress": {..},
    "businessAddress": {..}
  }
}

Merchant response

{
  "account": {
  	"merchant": {
    	"businessName": "Pearl SeaBass Inc",
      "businessUrl": "https://www.theseabassfrancis.com",
      "businessLogo": "https://www.theseabassfrancis.com/images/logo.png",
      "supportEmail": "[email protected]",
      "supportUrl": "https://support.pearl.com",
      "productDescription": "Seabass product description",
      "statementDescriptor": "Pearl Inc.",
      "defaultCurrency": "USD",
      "merchantCategoryCode": "4816",
      "bank": {..},
      "personalAddress": {..},
      "businessAddress": {..}
    }
  }
}