Merchant Groups

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Merchant Groups
  • Introduction
  • What is a Merchant Group and How do I use it?
  • Do I need to use Merchant Groups?
  • Creating Merchant Groups
  • Assigning a Merchant Group to a Payment or Authorisation
  • Assigning a merchant group to a repeat payment
  • Assigning a merchant group to a payment schedule
  • Renaming merchant groups

Introduction

This is available for customers using V2.13 onwards

The Asperato ONE MULTI license allows for up to 6 connected Payment Service Providers (PSPs) settling into separate bank accounts of different currencies. If you require to settle into multiple bank accounts of the same currency you will need our Multi-Merchant License. For example, you may have a Stripe account for GBP and EUR card payments, a GoCardless account for GBP and EUR direct debit payments and a Cybersource account for USD card payments. However, if you need to connect a second Stripe account to use for a subset of GBP card payments, then an Asperato Multi-Merchant License is required. The Merchant Groups feature is used to manage this requirement. Before the introduction of Merchant Groups, Asperato customers were unable to set-up their multi-merchant license requirements themselves, instead the Asperato support team carried this out on their behalf.

Merchant Groups enable you to set up different groups of PSP connections, and then assign those groups to different payments and authorisations.

What is a Merchant Group and How do I use it?

You can use them however you wish. We find the most common use case is with different legal entities - a franchise for example may have a single Salesforce org managing a few hundred stores across a region, and each of those stores would have their own merchant PSP accounts. The merchant group functionality facilitates this use case by allowing a new merchant group to be set up per store.

Another use case could be when a merchant has a requirement to settle funds into separate bank accounts each with the same PSP and currency for regulatory reasons, for example paying household rent and deposit payments into separate bank accounts.

Do I need to use Merchant Groups?

No. If, for any given currency and payment route, you only need a single PSP connected, then you can use the package with no Merchant Group. The merchant group functionality is backwards compatible with versions prior to 2.13. If you don't need to use it, your existing PSP connections, payments and authorisations will all be created and processed as before against a predefined "Default" merchant group.

Creating Merchant Groups

On the Asperato Set Up tab - navigate to the 'Merchant Group' button on the right hand side, click this and then enter the name of your Merchant Group and then click 'Create new merchant group' .  Under this you can now add your PSP Connections for that Merchant Group.  Repeat this process for as many Merchant Groups as you require.

Assigning a Merchant Group to a Payment or Authorisation

From V2.20 onwards, the Merchant Group field is a picklist on the Payment and Authorisation records populated by the values on the set up page.  Prior to this version, the field was a free text field and had to be populated manually or using a Flow with the correct Merchant Group for each Payment and Authorisation.

If the "Merchant Group" field is left blank then the "Default" merchant group will be assigned and used instead to ensure backwards compatibility.

Assigning a merchant group to a repeat payment

For a merchant group to be assigned to a repeat payment (a payment attached to an authorisation), then the "Merchant Group" field on both the payment and authorisation objects must match exactly. If they do not, then the payment will not be processed but instead return a failure status of "Merchant groups must match." 

Assigning a merchant group to a payment schedule

There is no need to assign a merchant group to a payment schedule directly - the merchant group used will be the one that is set on the authorisation record(s) attached to the payment schedule.

Renaming merchant groups

Merchant groups deliberately cannot be renamed, as this would break any automation in place that relied on the merchant group's name. If the group has to be renamed, it should be first deleted, then a new one created with the correct name, then the PSP connections re-established against the new group. If you are creating Authorisation records for repeat collections then you will need to contact Support@Asperato.com to help you with this change.