Yes. There are two ways to do this:
1. Merchant Category Code (MCC)
2. Merchant ID (MID)
Merchant Category Code (MCC)
Select merchants have their own MCC codes, specifically in the Airlines, Car Rental, and Hotels industries. You can find a list of MCCs programmatically by calling the Hydrogen MCC API or manually by using the Visa MCC Guide. Then you may add them in the Card Controls Admin on your account portal (Admin > Cards > Card Controls).
Merchant ID (MID)
You must know the Merchant ID (MID) of the merchant to use this control, which is NOT a publicly available value.
For example, you may form a partnership with ESG companies to reward your cardholders for recycling. You want to limit purchases on the card to only the ESG companies you have partnered with. Or you may be the merchant that is using Hydrogen for loyalty cards, and you want to restrict purchases only to your store.
If you want to use MIDs, and you are not the merchant, please have your partners provide you with their MIDs, and then add them in the Card Controls Admin on your account portal (Admin > Cards > Card Controls). If you or your partner are unsure of their MID, we have included guides from popular platforms below:
- Paypal
- Amazon
- Shopify (support request required)
- Stripe (support request required)
- Square (not available)
Can my users set controls on merchant names or only me?
We only allow merchant controls at a tenant level, and not in our cardholder spending controls app, for the following reasons:
1. Cardholders don't know MIDs of their favorite merchants as they aren't publicly available values.
2. Cardholders aren't familiar with MCC codes, which are only used in the payments industry. Instead of offering MCC controls, we have mapped each code to a Transaction Category, for a more intuitive cardholder experience.
3. Merchant Name controls (e.g. Amazon or Apple) are not feasible based on the reasons in the next section.
Can I or my users set a control only using the merchant name and not the MID or MCC?
No, we do not allow merchant controls by merchant name for the following reasons:
1. We receive the MID and MCC from the processor for each transaction, not a cleansed merchant name you or your users could easily decipher.
2. We must perform data cleansing on merchant data of each transaction so you can view a clean merchant name like "Starbucks" or "Best Buy." This isn't 100% accurate even at the largest national chains, and is especially more difficult to do at local merchants. Reconciliation of the cleansed data that may occur the following day won't help in a transaction where the control is instantly applied. For this reason, merchant controls on cleansed merchant names would result in a large unnecessary decline rate, and a poor cardholder experience.
3. We only have a few seconds to return a response for each card swipe. Performing data cleansing adds to this time, and could result in a transaction not being approved.
If you would like to offer REWARDS based on transactions cleansed to a merchant name e.g. 10% off at Starbucks, this is something we allow! Please find more details here.
Learn More
Can I (or my customers) add spending controls on the debit cards?
Can I restrict card purchases to my store or e-commerce website only?
Can I provide rewards to my cardholders based on specific merchant names or MCC codes?
How do I create card controls across all cardholders via the API?