Create a merchant program

After establishing an organization, you create a program with type MERCHANT. Use the Create program endpoint with type set to MERCHANT. You must create a new program for each country where your clients operate, and new programs for all time zones and currencies. After you create a program, call the Create merchant endpoint to create a merchant in the next step.

Ensure the merchant has a creditor

Create a Merchant object after creating a program. Merchants are the sellers who, according to the configured commercial conditions, have their receivables schedules bound by rules such as the amounts to be received after sales and marketplace rates and fees discounts. The creditor assigned to the merchant indicates the account where the amount for each merchant is settled. This step requires configuring the merchant status workflow, which must be done by the Pismo setup team in accordance with discussions with the client.

The Merchant object represents a business that sells products or services in your organization. Each merchant has a schedule and a register of transactions in the Marketplace object.

Use the Create merchant endpoint to create merchants. You link merchants to a marketplace when creating a Marketplace. Also understand that the Merchant creation process creates or associates the creditor. Refer to 5. Creditor association.

Link the merchants to the marketplace

After creating a Marketplace object, you group merchants who share the same tax structure and setup by linking them with the Link merchant and marketplace endpoint. Using the Marketplace object, you can also set up a schedule to handle settlements for all merchants that belong to the same marketplace and collect rates and fees over the sales performed by these merchants. Use Create marketplace to create a Marketplace object where you can specify a program by providing its ID in the program_id field. Then use Link merchant and marketplace to add merchants to a given marketplace.

You can group several merchants into a marketplace for flexibility, allowing you to provide incentives for different business patterns by using multiple marketplaces.

Ensure proper creditor association

The Creditor object represents the banking domicile of the commercial establishment. It’s associated with a Merchant object and includes a bank object, which is the merchant account. For example, a creditor could be the owner of a gas station. The owner's account receives the money from sales during the settlement process.

The owner supplies Pismo with the merchant account details for the business, which is where the funds from sales are deposited during the settlement process.

If you don't provide an existing creditor when creating the Merchant, this process creates an account and a new creditor, which is automatically assigned to the created merchant. This ensures all funding transfers to the merchant occur using this creditor account.

Usually you create the creditor at the same time you create the merchant, using the Create merchant endpoint. You can provide an existing creditor ID to create a merchant with an already existing creditor, or fill in the creditor fields to create a new creditor for the created merchant.