# Merchants Merchants are stores whose products you may want to sell in your experience. These can be hosted in a variety of e-commerce platforms, however, Violet makes these available to you for Checkout through unified models. Once a Merchant has onboarded and connected to your Violet Application through [Violet Connect](/prism/violet-connect.md), you will be able to access their products and facilitate checkout on their behalf. {% hint style="info" %} More information about merchant connections [here](/prism/merchants/merchant-app-connections.md) {% endhint %} ### Test Mode In test mode, including while working through our [Guides](/prism/violet-connect/guides/connection-health.md), you will see test merchants you didn't know or connect to yourself. That's okay. These sandbox merchants are connected to test stores on real ecommerce platforms. Though the merchants won't be familiar, the experience of viewing and getting merchant info will be the same as in production. The Violet Merchant APIs allow you to view information about the various merchants that are integrated with Violet and that your application has access to. You can learn more about these APIs, [here](/api-reference/merchants/merchant.md). --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.violet.io/prism/merchants.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.