Merchant
A business or person that sells goods or services, online or offline.
What is Merchant?
A merchant is any business or individual authorized to sell goods or services to customers, whether through a physical storefront, a website, a marketplace listing, or a phone order line. The term applies equally to a single-owner boutique and a multinational retailer. What matters is that the entity is the one offering something for sale and collecting payment for it. A neighborhood coffee shop and a global electronics brand's online store are both merchants, even though their scale is wildly different.
Why it matters
In payments and ecommerce infrastructure, the term narrows into a specific legal role: the "merchant of record" is the entity contractually and legally responsible for a transaction (collecting payment, remitting sales tax, complying with Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, and handling refunds or chargebacks. A business can be its own merchant of record or outsource that liability to a third-party provider, a model payment platforms have formalized (Stripe, for example, added a merchant-of-record offering through its 2024 acquisition of Lemon Squeezy). Being the storefront operator is distinct from being the merchant of record) a marketplace seller is often not the merchant of record for its own sales; the marketplace platform is.