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.
Underwriting Meets Multichannel Commerce
Sales-based underwriting is already well established.
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.
The lending businesses attached to commerce and payments platforms have also reached scale. Block and PayPal are expanding merchant lending as payments data becomes part of the credit model, PYMNTS reported in August.
Multichannel data adds another dimension. Consider a merchant whose Amazon sales flatten while Shopify and TikTok sales rise. An underwriting model confined to Amazon transactions could read the first development clearly while missing the second. A consolidated view could indicate whether total revenue is moving between channels or expanding through a new source of demand.
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Inventory data adds context as well. Amazon already lets merchants use one inventory pool to fulfill orders across multiple channels. Its supply chain operation says merchants using both Fulfillment by Amazon and Multichannel Fulfillment reduced out-of-stock rates by an average of 19% and improved inventory turnover by 12%.
For underwriters, channel concentration, sales volatility, inventory movement, advertising spending and returns give insight into the quality and durability of the revenue supporting a loan.
The Merchant’s Whole Business
SMB sales are already distributed broadly across digital channels, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The SMB Growth Engine: How Digital Sales and Customer Tracking Drive Revenue” found in July that digital channels now generate 57% of SMB sales on average. Meanwhile, 56% of digital-led SMBs increased revenue in 2025, compared with 42% of businesses that generated most of their sales through physical stores.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Why Main Street’s Digital Survivors Are Pulling Ahead: Four Years of Small Business Data” found in May that among businesses using marketplaces, 48% reported increased sales through that channel between January 2022 and February 2026. The share of SMBs that sold through their own websites was 57%, underscoring how little of a business may be captured by looking at one marketplace alone.
The August PYMNTS Intelligence SMB Growth Monitor found that 50.1% of SMBs had access to some form of financing. Among them, 37.8% described financing mostly or entirely as a strategic tool, while another 31.9% used it equally for strategic and essential purposes.
Cross-platform visibility could allow credit limits to reflect revenue generated across the business rather than only the volume captured by one marketplace.
Permission is an important factor here, tied to which providers are authorized to assemble that picture and for what purpose. Connecting accounts for order management does not automatically authorize their use for credit decisions, and data gathered from competing platforms raises questions about merchant consent, portability and permitted use.
Still, commerce is becoming multichannel faster than many lending models were built to accommodate. As platforms gain a wider view of where merchants sell, the same data that helps an SMB manage orders could eventually give lenders a broader pool of underwriting activity.
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