Why we ask before you sell

ReviveCart moves money on behalf of the merchants who use it, and payments platforms are required, by law and by the partners who process those payments, to know who they are moving money for. This is often called Know Your Customer, or KYC, and it isn't a formality we could opt out of even if we wanted to.

It exists to protect three groups at once. It protects merchants, by making it harder for fraud rings to open accounts using stolen identities and run stolen goods through a legitimate storefront. It protects customers, by keeping scam operations from setting up shop and taking payments they never intend to fulfill. And it protects the platform itself, since a payments business that can't answer basic questions about who it serves doesn't stay a payments business for long.

We've built this to be as quick as we reasonably can make it, but we won't skip it. Think of it as the equivalent of a bank asking for ID before opening an account, not as bureaucracy for its own sake.

During onboarding, we ask whether you're an individual or a registered business, and if it's a business, what country it's registered in. We ask what you sell, because your merchant category code is how card networks classify the risk profile of your business, and it affects what's possible to support. We collect your full legal name and business details, and for companies, a disclosure of who beneficially owns the business.

We also collect information about the account representative: name, date of birth, and home address, used to confirm you are who you say you are. We ask for a business tax ID (an EIN for US companies), which we're required to collect for tax reporting. And we ask for banking details so we know where to send your payouts.

Every one of these fields maps to something a regulator, a card network, or our payment processing partner actually requires before money can move. Nothing here is collected out of curiosity.

Onboarding is a short sequence of steps, each one building on the last. Here's what it looks like in order.

1. Tell us about your business

   You tell us whether you're operating as an individual or a registered business, where that business is registered, and what you sell. That last part, your merchant category, determines how card networks classify the risk of your business, so we ask you to be specific.

2. Tell us about you

   If you're the account representative, we collect your name, date of birth, home address, and contact details. For a registered company, we also ask who owns and controls the business, since regulations require us to know the real people behind an account, not just the entity name.

3. Verify your identity

   You provide a government-issued photo ID: a passport, driver's licence, or national ID card. You can upload it directly, or scan a QR code to continue on your phone, which gives you a guided camera flow that's usually faster than a desktop upload.

4. Add your payout details

   You add the bank account you want to receive funds in. This gets passed straight to our payment processing partner for verification, so payouts can start moving as soon as your account is approved.

5. Automated and manual review

   In the background, we run a set of automated checks against what you've submitted. Most merchants clear these within minutes and are approved automatically. A smaller number are held briefly so a member of our compliance team can take a closer look before the account goes live.

Some of what we collect during onboarding is sensitive enough that we don't want it sitting on our own servers at all, and we've built the system so it doesn't. Full government ID numbers, full bank account and routing numbers, and full tax ID numbers are sent directly to our payment processing partner for verification. They pass through ReviveCart's onboarding flow, but they are never persisted in our database.

What we retain on our side is the last few digits of each of those numbers, enough for our support team to confirm they're looking at the right account when you reach out, without exposing the full value to anyone at ReviveCart. If you ever need to update one of these numbers, you'll submit the new one the same way, and the same rule applies: the full value goes to our processing partner, not to us.

Verification isn't a one-time gate you pass at signup and never think about again. Once your account is live, we continue to watch a handful of signals: how often customers dispute charges on your account, how your transaction volume compares to what you told us at onboarding, and whether anything about the account's activity looks like it's changed in a way worth a second look.

As a business grows or changes shape, we may come back and ask for more information than we needed at first. This is normal and usually means your processing volume has crossed a threshold where additional verification is required, not that something is wrong. If that happens, we'll tell you specifically what's needed and why, and your payouts continue on schedule while you provide it, unless a check has flagged something that needs to be resolved first.

Some categories of business can't be supported on ReviveCart at all, because our payment processing partner prohibits them outright. That includes illegal goods and services and certain other regulated categories. We check for this during onboarding using the merchant category and business description you provide, and we'll let you know immediately if what you've described doesn't qualify.

This is also why accuracy matters after approval, not just at signup. If what a merchant actually sells turns out to differ from what they represented during onboarding, that's grounds for suspending the account while it's reviewed, even if the account had already been approved and processing normally.

ReviveCart currently supports merchants registered in the United States and Canada. We handle the two differently where the underlying requirements differ: a Social Security number where a US merchant would provide one, a Social Insurance Number for a Canadian merchant; a state for a US business address, a province for a Canadian one; routing numbers for US bank accounts, transit numbers for Canadian ones.

We know this is a real limitation for merchants based elsewhere, and we'd rather be direct about it than imply broader coverage than we actually have. Additional countries are something we plan to add over time, and we'll announce support as it becomes available rather than leave merchants to discover it by trial and error.

Every compliance check ReviveCart runs against an account, whether it's a sanctions screen, a business URL review, a velocity check at signup, or an ongoing dispute-rate review after go-live, is logged permanently. That record includes the automated result of the check and, where a person on our compliance team made a manual call, their decision as well.

These records are append-only. Nothing gets edited or removed after the fact, which means there is always a clear, complete history of why a given account was approved, held for a closer look, or restricted. If a merchant ever has a question about a decision made on their account, this is the record we look at to answer it.

If you have questions about anything on this page, or about a specific decision made on your account, reach out to compliance@revivecart.com. We can't always share every detail of an automated check, since some of that detail is what keeps the checks effective, but we can always explain the reasoning behind a decision that affects you.

ReviveCart, 2810 North Church Street, Wilmington, DE 19802.