I have had to set up Merge replication on a small custom database located in the US to a server in China. Our company’s WAN and uplinks at the branch offices leaves a LOT to be desired. Anyways, here’s the steps I took.

Publication database is on a Windows 2008 R2 Highly Available Cluster.
Databases are both on SQL Server 2008 R2 instances.
Create a clustered file share for the replication snapshot files to be located.
Create an AD service account to run the Merge Agent and Snapshot Agent.
Grant the appropriate permissions for the service account to the cluster share.
Run the create merge publication script (I’ll share later).
Log onto the remote server.
Create the database that will be the subscriber.
Run the subscription script (I’ll share later).
Back on the publisher DB, execute sp_addmergesubscription with the details needed.
On the subscriber, add the users and logins as needed and enjoy.

Since this is a small database, and there aren’t a lot of heavy hitting databases on either server, I decided to allow the publisher also act as the distributor. I can always break and change that if needed later on.