MarketPlace Payments and the Merchant of Record: What does it mean?

Amazon is MarketPlace. If you want to make or create your own product or import goods from another country to sell Amazon offers a platform to list, sell and fulfill your orders.

MarketPlace Payments would work as follows. You see a pair of sunglasses sold by ABC company for $20. You checkout and wait for your glasses. What happens behind the scenes?

First Amazon is the Merchant of Record. This essentially means a few very important things:

• You see “Amazon” on your credit card statement NOT “ABC”. Amazon makes the process of accepting payments simple for their sellers. The seller does not have to apply, show documentation, eventually get approved [or denied] and then enter credentials that “connect” their merchant account to the Amazon payment engine
• Amazon collects a premium for this service and generates revenue from their cost to process the payment and what they charge the seller
• Amazon initially deals with returns and disputes. So if there is a problem you reach out to Amazon and they in turn deal with the seller
• Amazon funds the seller less payment related fees typically via an ACH Payment Solution
• Amazon assumes payment risk [eg can’t collect chargeback fees from seller]

So a Merchant of Record acts similarly to a Payment Aggregator or Payment Facilitator with one key difference being the name that appears on the end customer statement being the MOR.

For more information on MarketPlace Payments contact us.