EF Code First Lazy loading Not Working

I realized that the problem was that the Merchant class did not meet requirements for proxy generation. Specifically, I needed to add a protected parameterless constructor. I only had a private one.

Another thing that can cause lazy loading to fail is navigation properties that are not virtual. That was not the case for OP, but this question is a top Google result so it may help some.

And yet another possible cause is a mapped database column that doesn't exist. I was surprised to see that break lazy loading rather than throw a database exception.