Understanding merchants and applications

To enable businesses to collect payments through your platform, you will use Rainforest's API and components to interact with Merchant and Merchant Application entities.

• A merchant is an individual business that your platform will enable to take payments. It represents a single legal entity, such as an LLC with a specific tax ID number.
• A merchant application represents information about the business that might change over time, including their phone number, address, and bank account.

So if one of your customer businesses changes their address, they'll remain the same merchant, but get a new merchant application with the updated information.

Merchant statuses

Merchants move through a set of statuses indicating how far they are in their onboarding and when they are able to take payments:

• Each merchant starts in pending when they are created, and transitions to onboarding when they submit their initial application.
• The merchant moves to active when their first application is reviewed and approved to take payments.
• Later, the merchant may move to deactivated, at your request, or suspended, if Rainforest uncovers suspicious activity and can no longer accept payments on their behalf.

Merchant Application statuses

A single Merchant Application moves through statuses as it is filled out and reviewed:

• When a merchant is first created, it also automatically has a first merchant application in the created status.
• Once the merchant starts filling out the onboarding component, it transitions to in progress.
• After the merchant submits the completed application, it transitions to processing while the application is reviewed for fraud and then onboarded to our system.
• Depending on how Rainforest's review goes, the application then moves to:
  • Needs Information: there was a problem with the data entered by the merchant and they need to come back and make edits to their application.
  • Completed: the application was approved. Their merchant will also move to the active status. They can now take payments immediately.
  • In Review: Rainforest needs to review the merchant further and will be in touch with your platform to discuss.
  • Declined: Rainforest is unable to accept payments from this merchant.

If a merchant is already active with one merchant application, and then submits another,