This guide is meant to supplement the other modules with additional guidance for Merchant Aggregators and should not be used as a standalone guide for onboarding with Spreedly.
Creating Environments and Access Secrets
As a Merchant Aggregator, you will have extra considerations for the structure of your Spreedly Organization. For example, will your clientele need to share a single production environment? Will you want to segment your clientele into individual production environments? We generally recommend creating a unique environment and access secret for each of your sub-merchants, though there are special considerations for doing this. (We discuss this below in “Should I Separate My Merchants by Environments?”.)
You can use the UI at app.spreedly.com to create environments and access secrets, as demonstrated in Module 1. However, you may prefer to create environments and environment access secrets using the API, especially if you want to automate parts of your merchant onboarding process. There are sections for these requests in our API reference.
In Spreedly terminology, you may see the term “sub-merchant”. We refer to your clientele as sub-merchants of you, the merchant aggregator. But there is also a sub-merchant object that you can create via the API to assist in reporting purposes. We recommend creating a sub-merchant object for each of your clients in the environment(s) in which they transact.
Should I Separate My Merchants by Environments?
How do you know if you should segregate your sub-merchants by environments?
Payment method tokens are created and vaulted in a specific environment and cannot be shared across environments. For this reason, you may want to use a single environment for collecting all of your sub-merchants’ payment methods and performing transactions. If you decide to use a single environment, we recommend creating a sub-merchant object for each of your merchants and passing the sub_merchant_key when you create the gateway token for each merchant. This will make it easier to separate the merchant data for reporting purposes.
If you do not need your merchants to share payment method tokens, we recommend creating a unique environment for each merchant. This will keep transaction and payment method data separate for ease of reporting and troubleshooting. Additionally, certain features like Advanced Vault and Account Updater can be enabled at the environment-level, which allows for easier implementation of the features your clientele can access.
Configuring Advanced Vault
Spreedly allows you to enable or disable your Advanced Vault feature in specific environments depending on your needs. For example, you may want to allow one environment to use the Account Updater process while disabling access to this feature on another on behalf of your sub-merchants.
If you would like to gain access to Advanced Vault and its suite of features, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
By default, Advanced Vault and Account Updater are disabled for your Organization and each environment. First, you will need to speak to your Customer Success Manager about enabling Advanced Vault. Once Advanced Vault is enabled for your Organization, you will need to turn it on in app.spreedly.com. Navigate to your Organization’s name on the sidebar and then select “Organization settings”. From this page, you will want to enable “Advanced Vault”, “Account Updater”, and “Allow Account Updater at Environment Level”.
Once these features are enabled at the Organization level, you can use the sidebar to navigate to any Environment, select “Environment settings”, and use that page to enable Advanced Vault and Account Updater as you see fit. (Note: Advanced Vault will need to be enabled in your account for you to enable Account Updater.)
Collecting Payment Methods
You may want to segment payment data in a multitude of environments (as mentioned in the “Creating Environments and Access Secrets” section). If this is the case, please ensure that your iFrame is configured to vault using the appropriate environment keys. (For guidance on configuring the iFrame, please review Module 2.)
Remember, one environment cannot share payment method tokens with another, so it is possible that you will want to use only one production environment. This will, of course, depend on your use case.
Configuring Connections
For each individual sub-merchant in your organization, you will want to configure a unique production gateway token using that sub-merchant’s credentials. (For guidance on configuring external connections, whether in sandbox or production, please review Module 3.) Remember that a gateway token will only work in the environment in which it’s created; if you segment your sub-merchants’ data by environment, you’ll also want to segment gateway tokens by environment.