Merchant lending has traditionally been built around the sales a platform can see. Multichannel commerce is widening that view.

A small- to medium-sized business (SMB) might collect orders through its own website, Amazon, Walmart, TikTok and other marketplaces while using the same inventory and staff to serve all of them. A lender attached to one of these channels can see what passes through its system. The merchant, however, operates one business.

Amazon announced Thursday morning (Sept. 24) that it will allow sellers in the United States to connect Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok accounts to Seller Central and manage outside listings and orders from the Amazon workspace, PYMNTS reported. More than 95% of independent sellers in Amazon’s store sell through multiple channels, and those sellers account for more than 60% of sales in its store, according to Amazon.

Sellers choose which outside accounts to connect, and access controls prevent outside data from being used to inform Amazon’s retail decisions. Planned analytics will eventually combine traffic, advertising spending and sales information from connected channels, the report said.

A platform that can consolidate a merchant’s activity across several storefronts can potentially assemble a different picture of the business from one based on transactions from a single marketplace.

Square said in March that improvements to its underwriting models allowed it to extend credit offers to over 50% more sellers, including seasonal and project-based businesses whose revenue patterns can be difficult to evaluate conventionally, PYMNTS reported. The company said its position in the flow of funds supplies near-real-time business data for its lending models.

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