“Merchant”: content of the concept in Russian, international and foreign regulatory legal sources

In countries with a unified system of private law, to which Russia also belongs, it is usually not customary to single out a merchant as a separate type of entity, and as a result, the definition of this concept is most often absent both in the doctrine and in the legal sources of these countries. With the advent of e-commerce, not constrained by the borders of individual states and territories, such conceptual uncertainty becomes inappropriate and opinions are increasingly expressed in the legal literature about the need to develop a unified standardized system of commercial law categories. In this paper, the concept of "merchant" is studied from the standpoint of international, foreign and Russian law in order to develop common theoretical approaches to understanding the basic categories of commercial and business law.