Selling directly to your readers, whether it’s through your own website or a storefront platform, can be one of the most powerful ways to grow your author business. It gives you full control over your brand, pricing, and customer relationships. But it also comes with some added behind-the-scenes complexity.

That’s where a Merchant of Record (MoR) comes in.

An MoR is the entity that legally processes transactions on your behalf, taking on responsibilities like tax compliance, payment processing, and billing-related customer support.

If you’ve dreamed about selling your books directly to readers, but have concerns over how to manage all the steps doing so comes with (and achieve them compliantly), using a service that acts as an MoR may be the answer you’ve been waiting for.

What Does a Merchant of Record Do for Sales?

When you sell direct, you’re not relying on a marketplace like Amazon KDP to handle the logistics. Instead, you are responsible for the full transaction lifecycle, from purchase to delivery.

A Merchant of Record steps in to help you manage the most technical and compliance-heavy parts of that process. This typically includes:

• Processing customer payments
• Managing sales tax, VAT, and GST
• Handling refunds and chargebacks
• Providing billing-related customer support
• Ensuring compliance with regional regulations

In essence, the MoR becomes the legal seller of record for your books—but the product and brand remain fully owned and controlled by you.

Simplifying Tax Compliance Across Regions

One of the biggest challenges that comes with selling direct is managing taxes, especially if you sell in multiple states or countries. This is because every U.S. state and every country has its own unique rules, regulations, and thresholds for taxes that must be abided by in order to avoid costly penalties.

An MoR helps with this part of direct sales by:

• Automatically calculating the correct tax rate based on the customer’s location
• Collecting and remitting taxes to the appropriate authorities
• Handling tax registrations in different jurisdictions
• Keeping up with changing tax laws and thresholds

Without an MoR, you may need to register for sales tax permits in multiple regions, file regular returns, and stay current on constantly evolving regulations in every state and/or country. This can very quickly become confusing and overwhelming.

With an MoR, that burden is lifted, allowing you to sell globally without needing a deep expertise in tax law.

Streamlining Customer Support for Payments

Offering direct sales for your books also means you’re on the front lines for customer support. While that can be great for building relationships, billing issues can often eat up valuable time and resources.

An MoR will step in to typically handle support regarding:

• Payment failures or declined transactions
• Refund requests and processing
• Chargebacks and dispute resolution
• Delivery of receipts and billing confirmations

And if you’re selling physical print books direct, many times, an MoR will also provide or initiate customer support for any items that might have arrived damaged, misprinted, or never arrived at all. This is especially true if you use a print-on-demand service for your store for fulfillment of books.

This separation from purchase-related customer support allows you to instead focus on interacting with your readers in the ways that matter most: to talk about your books, answer content-related questions, or share more about yourself as an author.

Reducing Risk and Operational Overhead

Acting as your own seller of record comes with legal and financial risk. Errors in tax collection, compliance gaps, or mishandled disputes can lead to penalties or lost revenue.

A Merchant of Record helps to mitigate this risk by:

• Taking on legal responsibility for transactions
• Ensuring compliance with international commerce regulations
• Managing fraud prevention and payment security
• Handling audits and financial reporting related to transactions

This can be especially valuable to author businesses, which often consist of very small or solo-member teams that want to scale without building a full finance and compliance infrastructure. With an MoR, you don’t need to worry about figuring out those logistics before you can start selling direct.

Enabling Scalable, Global Growth

Direct sales often start small, but they don’t always stay that way for long. As your readership grows, so does your reach.

An MoR supports that growing reach by making it easier to:

• Sell in different currencies
• Accept a variety of different payment methods
• Expand into international markets
• Maintain a consistent checkout experience worldwide

Instead of rebuilding your backend systems every time you want to enter a new market, an MoR can provide you with an easily-scalable foundation from day one.

Trade-Offs of Using a Merchant of Record

While an MoR can simplify many aspects of direct sales, it’s important to understand the trade-offs that come with using one.

There will almost always be either fees or a revenue share associated with using a platform that acts as an MoR. For example, the Amazon KDP platform (which is an MoR, but does not allow for direct sales) is free to use, but they keep a portion of every sale, as well as charge delivery fees per eBook purchase. 

True direct sales MoR platforms, like The Bookshelf, may instead opt to not keep any revenue from your book sales, and instead require a subscription fee to use, as well as standard credit card and transaction fees.

Any MoR provider will also have its own policies and restrictions in place, typically around:

• Payment page design and handling
• Refund and dispute policies
• Types or content of products sold
• Compliance requirements
• Payout schedule for earnings

These are necessary to provide some ease of consistency between all authors using their platform, as well as legal protections to the MoR itself, since they are the ones responsible for any possible repercussions of a sale.

This just means that your author business must operate within the platform’s framework, which may not always perfectly align with all your preferences. It’s important to do your research, read any terms of service and other agreements carefully, and weigh restrictions against benefits. 

Is a Merchant of Record Right for Your Direct Sales Strategy?

A Merchant of Record is especially useful if you:

• Want to sell both print and digital books directly to readers
• Have (or plan to have) an international audience
• Want to avoid managing complex tax requirements
• Prefer to outsource some customer support
• Are looking to scale without increasing operational burden

If your goal is to build a streamlined, professional direct sales experience, an MoR can remove many of the friction points that independent authors often come up against. By handling the most complex parts of selling direct, an MoR allows you to focus on what direct sales are really about: building relationships and delivering more value to your readers.

Related Questions

Is a Merchant of Record the same as a payment processor?

No, these are two different items, though an MoR platform will include a specific payment processor within it. Where a payment processor is the system used for facilitating transactions, the MoR is the entity behind it taking on the legal and financial responsibilities of each transaction.

Does using a Merchant of Record affect my branding?

It depends on the platform or service being used. While your brand is still front and center in the sales experience, the MoR’s name will likely appear on receipts or credit card statements. However, most authors find that these requirements have minimal impact on their brand, especially when they help to make the reader’s experience more clear and consistent.

Will a Merchant of Record provide access to sales data and customer information?

If the MoR platform is a proponent of true direct sales and all its advantages, then yes, they should include a dashboard and reporting tools within your account that give you clear visibility into transactions, revenue, and customer activity. However, the level of detail and customization can vary by platform. And most MoRs that are not direct-sales focused (such as Amazon KDP) will provide limited sales data and no customer information.