Inovio goes the extra mile to address merchant challenges

Commerce has become increasingly digital, intelligent, and global, and merchants need a payments solution that meets customer demands and optimises experiences while minimising risks. Inovio Payments, LLC, has developed an innovative payments gateway solution that solves the challenges of the evolving world of payments.

This fully integrated omnichannel payments platform gives ecommerce merchants and businesses of all sizes the ability to accept all types of payments, including credit, debit, and prepaid cards, and recurring and card-on-file. The flexibility Inovio provides allows merchants to cap off engagements with convenient, customer-centric transactions.

Furthermore, the platform’s architecture is designed for development agility, enabling Inovio to adapt to evolving consumer demands and industry trends without sacrificing other features. It also allows Inovio to keep technical debt and platform maintenance costs low and, instead, focus resources on innovation and customer support.

Meeting expectations for frictionless payment experiences

Most payment platforms were designed for one-off payments. They’re well suited to customer engagements in which shoppers find the merchandise they want, pay with a credit or debit card, and may never make other purchases from that brand again. However, successful merchants need tools that help them build ongoing relationships with consumers. Loyal customers return to make additional purchases, and optimising experiences for them is important to grow revenues.

Two of Inovio’s features that contribute to payment ease and convenience for loyal customers are recurring payments and card-on-file payments. Subscription or recurring payment customers enter their card data once and, with their approval, their cards are then charged monthly or at a set cadence, for items such as streaming services, property maintenance, media subscriptions, or curated boxes. When the consumer sets up recurring payments, Inovio recognises the card type, ensuring it is not a prepaid card. Furthermore, the intelligent system maximises card approval rates, checking the cardholder account balances and, if necessary, holding the charge until sufficient funds are available.

Of course, not all ecommerce customers have a subscription or ongoing services. But merchants can still optimise their experiences with card-on-file payments. Returning customers can use tokenized, stored payment data for fast, convenient checkout rather than entering their card data each time they pay. Additionally, Inovio periodically checks stored information to ensure the data is updated and approval rates are high.

In addition to tokenisation, Inovio uses other layers of security to protect cardholder data and merchants’ businesses from data breaches and loss. Inovio employs encryption to ensure payment data is secure as it passes from consumers to merchants and 3-D Secure, which provides additional security for online transactions. Inovio is also a Payment Card Industry (PCI) Level 1 Compliant Processor that reduces the PCI burden for its merchant clients.

Enhancing merchant experiences

When Inovio designed its platform, it also planned to optimise experiences for merchants in addition to consumers. First, it offers a streamlined boarding process, leveraging a worldwide network of payment industry partners. Inovio also provides seamless integration with merchants’ point of sale or management systems.

Inovio also takes a practical approach to providing merchants with payments functionality, knowing that in the real-world, digital payments and ecommerce meet consumer demands, but they also increase risks for the merchant. Inovio monitors activity in real time to identify patterns of potentially malicious activity and provides tools to block it automatically.

Additionally, chargebacks, instituted to protect consumers, can negatively impact merchants’ businesses. When consumers demand refunds from their banks, funds are taken from merchants’ accounts, requiring them to dispute the chargeback to recover that revenue. The process is time-consuming and labor-intensive and may not lead to a favourable result for the merchant.

Inovio has created a more merchant-friendly way to address chargebacks. Instead of routing the customer dispute to card brands, Inovio handles the chargeback, automatically matching it to the transaction. In some cases, associating the charge with the transaction is enough to remind consumers that they made the charges. If the dispute continues, Inovio can handle the refund, avoiding having a chargeback on the merchant’s record and minimising penalties, fees, and possibly a “high-risk merchant” designation.

The best-case scenario, however, is not to have a chargeback at all. Inovio is designed to stop invalid transactions before they can lead to chargebacks. Inovio leverages an intelligent system that allows merchants to take control of payments activity. The merchant can set limits on how much a customer can spend and how many charges can occur in a period on one card. Inovio also tracks how many times a card has been declined and the reason, for example, because it was lost or stolen or due to insufficient credit or funds. This data provides valuable insights that allow merchants to make informed decisions that help them protect their businesses.

This platform feature also helps merchants know their customers better, even supporting negative and positive databases. Insights from payment data can be tailored by geographic region, new vs. established customers, and VIP customers that the merchant may enable to make larger purchases or transact more often in a single day. With these insights, merchants have the power to mitigate fraud risks while maximizing revenue.

Merchants working with other payment gateways typically must work with third-party providers to have these capabilities. However, with Inovio, they’re included.

Commerce with no barriers

Inovio gives ecommerce merchants a practical way to expand their businesses around the world. It supports nearly every international currency and has the ability to settle transactions across borders through a vast network of acquirers while still making the checkout experience simple for consumers. Consumers can purchase in their own currency while merchants receive payment in their native currency, with exchange rates updated daily. In addition, by eliminating price differentials on the checkout page, Inovio helps merchants capture more sales and reduce returns and chargebacks.

Choosing the right payment solution will impact ecommerce and SMB merchants’ businesses by helping to provide excellent CX and build loyalty, protect them from chargebacks and fraud, and expand to new channels and even global markets.

Inovio is designed to stand apart from other gateway solutions by supporting these commerce goals and with its flexibility and agility to address future trends and challenges, making it the obvious choice for online businesses.