Merchant is a payment and checkout management tool designed specifically for OTT broadcasters. When you use Merchant, Cleeng acts as your merchant of record and offloads you with merchant responsibilities. In practice, it means that Cleeng applies relevant taxes such as VAT or sales tax to your sales automatically depending on local regulations, and our team files and remits your taxes on your behalf.
Merchant features
Merchant deals with every aspect of subscriber billing and tax management for OTT video platforms, in particular:
- Out-of-the-box checkout: Merchant API offers a variety of payment options, adjusted to different user needs worldwide and supports 1-click registration and payments, letting you process millions of secure transactions. MediaStore SDK provides a set of ready-to-use front-end modules for your purchase process that you can customize with your branding in no time.
- Payment processing: Merchant automates the dunning process and provides payment analytics. When Cleeng acts as your merchant of record, our team handles the financial and legal complexity of the payment process for you, including refunds and chargebacks.
- Tax management: a dynamic checkout engine adapts automatically to the customer’s local tax codes, ensuring the correct application of taxes at the point of purchase. When Cleeng acts as your merchant of record, our team takes care of tax calculation and remittance to relevant authorities. To ensure tax compliance in the US and Canada, Cleeng uses the integration with a market-leading sales tax management tool – Avalara.
- Security and compliance: the tool is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, PSD2, PCI DSS, VAT-MOSS, US & Canada-State tax laws, and SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Cleeng protects information with data encryption and additional security layers on the backend. On top of that, Merchant provides anti-fraud settings adjusted for the OTT business.
Main benefits
- Global reach and payment flexibility for your viewers, thanks to integrations with numerous payment options, including Adyen (which enables Apple Pay, Google Pay, and card payments with 3D Secure support) and PayPal
- Reduced complexity of the financial and legal aspects on your side with Cleeng taking care of your VAT and sales tax management, including tax collection, tax remittance to tax authorities, and tax returns.
- Compliance with all the key regulations worldwide
- Secure payment processing
Additionally, with Cleeng being the merchant of record, all transactions made through our solution automatically fall under our Privacy Policy which is covered in the Cleeng User Agreement document (automatically attached to each purchase receipt as an obligatory measure).
Merchant and other Cleeng products
Please note that you can implement Merchant only if you use Core (but it doesn’t work both ways and Merchant is not necessary to use Core).
Merchant, like all the products in the Cleeng stack, is powerful alone, but better together. Using Merchant with Core, ChurnIQ, and Hi5 you additionally get:
- Improved subscriber conversion thanks to the seamless checkout experience, pricing and trials testing, and payment analytics
- Quick setup of the whole purchase process, including both the backend and the customizable front-end modules