what is the best way to store merchant info that will be need to use our app

We are creating a payment app . (yes i am a shopify noob).
I am going through the tutorial and have a hello world type page displaying in the admin section of the store.
What i need to do in this admin section is collect some creds and other info needed to access our payment apis. This info needs to persist and eventually used in the payment extension and it is merchant specific.

What is the best ways to do this?

Do i save this info in shopify or do i save it on my side.

if i save it on my side, how do i identify who is calling my endpoints?

thanks