The Paypers | Insights into payments and beyond. Cross-Border Payments and Commerce Report 2019 – 2020.

Victor Iezuitov

Scaling the potential for digital goods merchants on the global market – best practices from Victor IEZUITOV, the CEO of Nexway

About Victor Iezuitov: With extensive international experience in finance and management, Victor has worked as a board member, CFO, CEO, and Senior Analyst in various industries such as financial services, private banking, and investment funds.

Could you give to our readership a brief introduction of Nexway? What type of merchants do you serve and what is your core offering?
Nexway is a technology and services company for online commerce. As a merchant of record, we run end-to-end payment operations. By connecting their online store to our e-commerce and payment platform, merchants can start to sell in 140 countries in a matter of days. Our clients are midsize to large software, retail, and services company from all over the world, such as Fnac-Darty, Avast, Eset, BitDefender, and many more.

“We believe there will be more and more adoption of subscription
in any industry and vertical, be it for physical or digital goods.”

At Nexway, we are our clients’ business partners. We share the same objectives of high conversion and retention. That’s why our business model is based on a percentage of the revenue generated.

How do you help online businesses scale, grow, and thrive in today’s global sales marketplace?
Our service not only enables our clients to sell in any local market, but it also removes the headache of orchestrating and running day-to-day operations. Our clients can focus on their product and go-to-market, and leave the last mile of e-commerce to us.

We can deal with the payment processing, fraud prevention, chargeback management, invoicing, local sales tax and VAT settlement, fund and FX management, and customer support in 12 languages. With our platform, merchants can personalize their shopping cart, manage their products and pricing, run subscriptions, automate email notifications, and much more.

For merchants facing the complexity and associated workload of managing payment operations, it’s a great comfort to have us act as an extension of their teams to run the whole process. That’s what we mean when we say ‘Our team. Your success’.

What are the key growth markets for merchants selling digital goods? 
Selling online is a natural go-to-market for digital goods merchants, and with no borders.

The other growth driver is about business models, adopting a recurring pricing scheme, bringing predictability in the revenue stream, building a user base that can be leveraged for additional products. It also matches customers’ needs of usage vs. possession.

What advice would you give to online businesses that want to sell (successfully) within these markets? What are the main challenges that they need to consider?
It is crucial to know the local market trends: what payment methods customers like, localizing all the content, answering the customers’ requests in their language.

It’s also an operational challenge, as this requires teams to daily manage payments and risk, fulfilment, and customer care, to make sure you comply with local regulations. The advice I would give is to examine whether you want to take care of this in-house or what parts of the business operations you are better off outsourcing.

What makes Nexway stand out from competitors?
We’ve been a pioneer in headless commerce – we strongly believe in the benefits of having a modular technology that’s easy to integrate with the existing IT systems: CMS, CRM, ERP, etc.

Our Monetize platform is based on microservices that can be leveraged through APIs. The real business benefit that our clients enjoy is time-to-market: whenever something changes on the website, or on the back-end, and it does happen every day, that’s the nature of commerce. It doesn’t impact a whole block of features, just the concerned granular microservice. This brings agility to IT.

Another reason why our clients appreciate Nexway lies in our high performance on subscriptions: our retention rate overall is above 76%. This is very reassuring also for merchants who are transitioning to subscription, as it’s so difficult to master all levers when you just got started. We get so well with retention because we apply data intelligence into all we do: payment routing, fraud detection, product recommendations, etc. We have both the technology and the teams to leverage machine learning and it produces great results.

As 2020 is just around the corner, what do you think will happen in the subscription economy over the next 12 months and beyond? 
We believe there will be more and more adoption of subscription in any industry and vertical, be it for physical or digital goods. It means there will be a lot of experimenting and fine-tuning, which require advanced features in the pricing structure, and data analysis which is key to improve performance.

ABOUT NEXWAY
Nexway is a software and service company for e-commerce and payment. We expand the sales potential of software, retail, and services companies across 140 countries. Our customers rely on Nexway to power their subscription models, manage local payment methods, prevent fraud, engage resellers, deliver key customer insights, and beyond.
www.nexway.com