Merchant of record or MOR is an essential link between a company that needs to accept electronic payments and consumers of its products. Merchant of record concept goes far beyond collecting payments for products and services. MOR is responsible for many things related to sales process, such as merchant funding, withholding of taxes and transaction processing fees, chargeback management, etc. If a merchant operates through some online marketplace, then its MOR is also responsible for split funding credit card processing mechanisms. As a result, small-to-medium-size businesses prefer to use larger entities as their merchants of record, because they are unable to perform all MOR-specific functions themselves. At first it may seem that merchant of record and payment facilitator concepts are almost the same. However, PayFac concept is more flexible. As small business grows, MOR model might become too restraining, while payment facilitators provide robust APIs, which sometimes allow merchants to customize each function separately, according to their specific needs. To put it simple, not all merchants of record are PayFacs (master merchants) and not all PayFacs are MORs.
Read more about merchant of record concept in our respective article on Paylosophy.
