Merchant Central's pricing model is based on the number of active merchants that are being reported.
An active merchant is any merchant for which services such as residual income calculations, portfolio reporting, or merchant onboarding are performed.
In order to eliminate unnecessary costs, ISOs should ensure that inactive merchants are deactivated.
To learn how to deactivate inactive merchants manually please see our article on How To Deactivate Merchants.
Note that your CRM also activates new merchants and deactivates inactive merchants automatically when specific criteria is met.
Below are the rules for automatically activating or deactivating merchants in the CRM.
Automatic Merchant Activation/Re-Activation
A new merchant account is automatically activated when it is created from the TurboApp OR when it is created through one of the following integrations:
- TransFirst (TSYS Retail)
- Elavon
- First American
- MeritCard
- Paysafe
- Nuvei
- Clearent
- Netevia
- TSYS
- FiservPayfac
A previously deactivated merchant is automatically reactivated through the following integrations and events:
- Fiserv CardConnect - new merchant received
- Fiserv Payfac - new merchant received
- Paysafe Reporting - new data received
- Global Payments - a received transaction or merchant is in open/reopen status
- TransFirst - a recent dispute received
- Repay - new chargeback received with a recent processing date, new merchant received with a recent report date and status set to Open), new transactions received with a recent batch date
Deactivated merchants are reactivated when the account information retrieved from one of the following processors shows the Open Status as Active:
- Access One API
- Access One API North
- Aurora API
- Business Track
- Clearent
- Clientline
- Elavon
- First American
- Fiserv Canada
- Fiserv Card Connect
- Global Payments
- Merchant Central API
- Merchant Industry FDR
- Merchant Industry
- MeritCard
- MX Connect
- Netevia Signapay
- Vantiv
- Paysafe Reporting
- TransFirst (TSYS Retail)
- TSYS
- WorldPay
A deactivated merchant account is also reactivated if they are included in any residuals calculations.
Automatic Merchant Deactivation
Your CRM also keeps track of and deactivates inactive merchants automatically when any of the following criteria is met:
-
The residuals import income/expense/net fields for a merchant are equal to zero AND the merchant was created in Merchant Central more than 60 days ago AND no transactions took place under the merchant's account in the last 60 days AND the merchant is marked as Closed:
-
The Account Information retrieved from supported integrations (see list below) shows that the merchant is closed or that the merchant was closed more than 180 days ago.
-
Merchant Central will stop retrieving information for Elavon merchants when a merchant is no longer listed in the API response or the merchant is found to be closed (merchant status isn't approved).
- AccessOne integration - import chargebacks/retrievals/scrape account information (when the merchant number is wrong)
- Encytro - Purge Closed task (when Turn Off Scrape is enabled)
- Sysnet - Purge Closed task (when Turn Off Scrape is enabled)
- Maverick Payment - merchants that are not present in the API response
- Nuvei - if the merchant isn't active
- Residuals import – when the active closed merchant has amounts equal to zero
Here is a list of integrations that support automatic merchant deactivation:
- Access One API
- Access One API North
- Aurora API
- Business Track
- Clearent
- Clientline
- Elavon
- First American
- Fiserv Canada
- Fiserv Card Connect
- Global Payments
- Merchant Central API
- Merchant Industry FDR
- Merchant Industry
- MeritCard
- MX Connect
- Netevia Signapay
- Vantiv
- Paysafe Reporting
- TransFirst (TSYS Retail)
- TSYS
- WorldPay
Email Notification of Account Status Changes
Your users can receive an email notification when a merchant to which they have access has an account status change, including activation, deactivation, and closing. Here are the steps to enable:
- Go to Manage >> Site Options >> Scheduled Tasks
- Confirm the task named "Daily Email Alerts - Account Status Changes" is not already scheduled. If not, click Add Task.
- Pick "Daily Email Alerts - Account Status Changes"" from the list.
- Select a time of 11:00 Daily or any time after your datasources finish pulling in account information.
- Click Add.
- Next you will enable the notification for each needed user class.
- Go to Manage >> User Classes
- Click Permissions for a given user class.
- Expand the 'Portfolio Activity Monitoring' section.
- Select the appropriate permission for what scope of notifications the users in this user class should receive (Associated, Groupwide, or Systemwide).
- Click 'Save Permissions'.
- Return to the User Classes page and repeat these final steps for each user class who should receive the email.
Merchant Status Change History
To see a monthly report of status changes for your merchants, go to Manage >> Logs >> Merchant Status Changes. Read more about this page here.
Manual Merchant Deactivation Override
If needed, you can override the default re-activation rules that are applied to manually deactivated merchants to prevent them from being automatically re-activated in certain scenarios.
To enable the override, reach out to the Merchant Central team and ask to enable: MANUAL_MERCHANT_DEACTIVATION_OVERRIDE
Once the setting is enabled, and a user deactivates a merchant manually, the following will take place:
- The system will ignore the deactivated merchant, and will not reactivate the merchant when data is received from the processor for that merchant.
- If a residuals upload provides residuals data for the deactivated merchant the merchant will still remain deactivated.
When this setting is on, a merchant can only be set to Active by a user.