Tiers: Open and Merchant of Record

Every account starts on Open, including every existing account. There is nothing to apply for and nothing to configure.

Your business is the seller of what you sell through INVO: coins, items and subscriptions. INVO processes the payment, keeps its fee, and pays your share out to you through payouts.

Tax is yours. INVO does not calculate, collect or remit sales tax, VAT or GST on Open-tier sales. If your sales are taxable where your players are, price for it and file it yourself. The tax amounts on quotes and webhooks (tax_usd, tax_refunded_usd and the rest) read 0.00 and tax_rate_pct reads null on this tier, and tax_treatment reads "partner_responsible": you are the seller and INVO charged no tax. See tax_treatment.

You pay the card fee; players pay the listed price. On a card purchase of coins the fee is 3.5% of the listed price (before tax) plus $0.15, charged against your earnings, and the player gets every coin you listed. See the card fee.

INVO becomes the seller on your card sales. INVO calculates, collects and remits consumption tax on your behalf where INVO is registered, and issues receipts to your players.

It requires INVO's approval, given per developer account. INVO reviews the account before approving it. To apply, use the Selling & Tax page in your INVO console, or contact INVO at partners@invo.network.

Fees: 5.0% + $0.15 on every card charge (card purchases of coins, Platform Commerce card sales and subscription charges), paid by you, plus 1.5% on a card issued outside the US. Tax INVO collects is still added to what the buyer pays, worked out on the listed price. Item purchases, the balance leg and transfers are the same as on Open.

A chargeback reserve applies. Part of your share of each card-funded sale is held, then released to you automatically. See the reserve.

1. You apply from the Selling & Tax page in your INVO console (or by contacting INVO, who records the application for you). You confirm that you have read these terms and the refund policy. You need at least one game on the account, and after a decision not to approve, you can apply again after a waiting period.
2. INVO reviews the account. Your identity verification must be approved, INVO may run a sanctions screen, and INVO carries out a risk review and a tax readiness check. You accept the Merchant of Record terms and refund policy.
3. INVO emails you the decision, with the fees that apply from then on.

Approval covers every game on the developer account; it is never per game. Once approved, new card charges in your games are made on Merchant of Record terms. Nothing in your integration changes.

If Merchant of Record is suspended or revoked, your account is on Open for every new charge from that moment. Charges already made keep the terms they were made on, including their refunds. Subscriptions keep running, and each renewal from then on is billed on Open terms. INVO emails you when Merchant of Record is approved, reinstated, suspended or revoked, and when an application is not approved.

On Merchant of Record, INVO issues a receipt for every card sale in your games: coin purchases (direct route and hosted checkout), Platform Commerce card sales and subscription charges. Every card refund of one of those sales gets its own refund receipt. INVO emails each receipt to the buyer when the buyer's email is known; the receipt number is always issued (a pending refund's number follows once it settles) and is always available to you, on the payloads below and in GET /api/dev/receipts. The receipt names Invo Tech Inc. as the seller, on behalf of your game, and shows the tax INVO collected, with INVO's registration number, when tax was collected.

Each receipt has a number (for example IR-2026-00000123; sandbox receipts start with IRS-) and a link to a printable receipt page that needs no login. Treat the link like the receipt itself: anyone with it can read it.

The same number reaches you. On a Merchant of Record card sale, receipt_number and receipt_url are added to:

• • the purchase.completed, platform_commerce.purchased and subscription.renewed webhooks;
• • the refund webhooks purchase.refunded, platform_commerce.refunded and subscription.refunded, carrying the refund receipt's number and link;
• • the success response of /api/currency-purchases/purchase-currency, GET /api/currency-purchases/order-details, the hosted checkout status read once it reads credited, GET /api/platform-commerce/purchase-status/<order_id>, and a paid first_charge on /api/subscriptions/subscribe.

On Open, and on Steam and game storefront sales on either tier, the two keys are absent, so those payloads are unchanged. The reads add them once the receipt has been issued. A refund that is still pending when its webhook is sent carries no refund receipt number yet. From your developer account, GET /api/dev/receipts lists every receipt INVO issued for your games, sales and refunds, with the same numbers and links.

"data": {
  "order_id":       "ORD_...",
  ...
  "receipt_number": "IR-2026-00000123",
  "receipt_url":    "https://invo.network/receipts/<token>"
}

On Merchant of Record INVO is the seller, so a chargeback on one of your card sales lands on INVO first. To cover that, INVO holds part of your share of each card-funded sale for a set number of days, then releases it to your available balance automatically.

• • Default terms: 10% of your share, held for 90 days. Terms may differ per account: INVO can set other terms, or waive the reserve, for a developer account.
• • What is held: your share of Platform Commerce card sales and of subscription charges paid by card. Card purchases of coins, purchases paid from a balance, Steam and game storefront sales and transfers are not held.
• • Each hold keeps its own date and is released on it, automatically. A change of terms applies to later sales only; holds already taken keep their terms.
• • Per developer account. The reserve covers every game on the account.
• • Open accounts have no reserve. A sale made on Merchant of Record terms stays held until its date, even if the account later moves to Open.

What you see. The balances you can withdraw are already net of the reserve: available_balance on GET /api/withdrawals/available-balance, available_balance_usd and requestable_usd on GET /api/dev/withdrawals/summary. Those two reads also carry these fields (additive):

{
  "reserve_held_usd":           "42.10",
  "reserve_next_release_at":    "2026-12-30T12:00:00+00:00",
  "reserve_release_schedule": [
    { "release_date": "2026-12-30", "amount_usd": "9.65" },
    { "release_date": "2027-01-02", "amount_usd": "32.45" }
  ],
  "balance_before_reserve_usd": "512.40",
  "reserve_terms":              { "pct": "10.00", "days": 90 },
  "in_flight_payouts_usd":      "0.00"
}

On an account that has never been on Merchant of Record, the reserve fields read "0.00", null or [], and balance_before_reserve_usd equals the available balance. in_flight_payouts_usd is not a reserve field: it can be above "0.00" on Open too, while a partner payout is being sent. If the reserve cannot be read the fields are null: show nothing then, never $0.00. A withdrawal request refused for insufficient balance while something is held carries the same fields. A partner payout request refused for insufficient owed balance carries them too, with reserve_scope: "developer_account", whenever something is held or a payout is being sent. Read the fields, not the message.

tax_treatment says why the tax on a sale is what it is. It appears in the breakdown of the /api/currency-purchases/quote response and on the purchase.completed webhook.

• • Open: "partner_responsible". You are the seller and INVO charged no tax. The tax amount is 0.00, tax_rate_pct is null, tax_note reads "No tax is charged on this purchase.", and tax_jurisdiction still carries the buyer's place (for example "GB" or "US-CA") when it is known. On Open card sales it replaces not_registered, unknown_jurisdiction and uncollected.
• • Merchant of Record: how INVO handled the tax, for example "collected" (INVO collected it and remits it) or "not_registered" (INVO has no registration for that place, so none was charged).
• • Steam and the game storefront rail: "external_mor" on both tiers. The storefront handles the tax.

Treat a value you do not recognise as informational, never as an error.

When a player pays through Steam or through the game storefront rail (rail: "game" on hosted checkout), the storefront is the seller, on both tiers. It charges the player, shows and collects any tax at its own checkout, and remits it. INVO adds no tax and no card fee to those purchases. The card pricing, the minimum card purchase and the chargeback guarantee do not apply: purchases through a third-party storefront or payment rail are unaffected.

A chargeback is a buyer disputing a card charge with their bank.

Chargeback guarantee, Merchant of Record. Fraud screening runs on every INVO card charge, on both tiers. On Merchant of Record, INVO also guarantees the result. When a chargeback on one of your card sales is raised as fraud (the cardholder says they did not authorize the payment), INVO covers it: your share of the sale is not taken back, nothing is held while the dispute is open, and no dispute fee is charged to you. On a lost dispute on a Platform Commerce card sale or a subscription charge, the purchase.disputed webhook carries guarantee_covered (true when the guarantee covered it). A lost coin chargeback takes back the player's coins, not your share, so the guarantee has nothing to cover there; its close still reports any dispute fee (below). The guarantee applies to INVO card payments only; purchases through a third-party storefront or payment rail are unaffected. Every other dispute works as described below, depending on your tier.

Open and the guarantee. On Open your business is the seller, so chargebacks are your responsibility, passed through at cost under the Open rules below, whatever the dispute reason. Card payments made on Open before November 8, 2026 keep the chargeback guarantee they were made with. Which terms apply follows the tier and date of the sale, not your account's tier when the dispute arrives: a sale made on Merchant of Record stays covered if the account later moves to Open.

The card fee on a lost chargeback, both tiers. A chargeback that is lost and not covered by the guarantee costs you what a refund of the same charge would. On a Platform Commerce card sale the card fee stays charged to you, as on a card refund. On a subscription charge the same is true, on every charge: your share is reversed and INVO's card fee on the lost amount is charged to you. The lost purchase.disputed reports it as card_fee_charged_to_partner_usd, with partner_debited_usd (your share reversed plus that fee); processing_fee_usd reads 0.00. The international card fee is not returned. A Platform Commerce sale made before the 2026-09 pricing keeps the terms it was sold under.

Open. You are the seller. Nothing is held while a dispute is open. If it is lost, the disputed amount is recovered as described under what a lost dispute takes back, and the card network's dispute fee is passed through to you at cost on card payments made from November 8, 2026 (coin purchases, Platform Commerce card sales and subscriptions): charged in full, and credited back if the network returns it. Subscription card charges already pass it through today. The closing purchase.disputed reports it as dispute_fee_usd (a string, or null) and dispute_fee_charged_to_partner (true, false or null). Only card payments are part of this pass-through; a bank-debit payment's dispute fee is not passed through. Open card payments made before November 8, 2026 keep the chargeback guarantee they were made with.

Merchant of Record. INVO is the seller, so INVO manages the dispute and pays the dispute fee. A sale the chargeback guarantee covers never carries a dispute fee; the one exception for other disputes is subscription charges under the chargeback rate threshold below.

• • The disputed amount on a subscription or Platform Commerce card sale is taken back from your share of the sale when the dispute opens. If INVO wins the dispute, it is restored to you.
• • A chargeback rate threshold applies. Your chargeback rate for a calendar month (UTC) is the number of disputes opened that month, excluding inquiries, divided by the number of card charges completed on your account that month (coin purchases, Platform Commerce and subscriptions). A month's rate is final when the month ends. If your rate for the previous calendar month was above 0.75%, the dispute fee on subscription charges disputed this month is charged to you, as on Open (except on a chargeback the guarantee covers), and INVO reviews your Merchant of Record approval. INVO may change the threshold and will publish it here.
• • The chargeback reserve is how INVO covers disputed amounts on sales whose share has already been paid out.

The lifecycle of a chargeback

What a lost dispute takes back, unless the chargeback guarantee covers it:

• • A card purchase of coins: the coins are taken back from the player's available balance, up to what the purchase credited and never below zero. Your share of the sale is not touched.
• • A Platform Commerce card sale: your share of the sale is reversed. If it has already been paid out to you, the amount is netted from your next payout. INVO's card fee stays charged to you, as on a card refund.
• • A subscription charge: that period is reversed as if it had been refunded in full. The subscription is not cancelled. See subscription refunds and chargebacks.
• • Steam: a Steam chargeback arrives once, already lost, as purchase.disputed with dispute_status: "lost", and takes the coins back the same way. It has no evidence step and does not appear on the Disputes page.

Seeing disputes and adding evidence

When a buyer's bank disputes a card payment made in your game, INVO handles the dispute with the card processor for you. You can see every dispute on your games in the INVO console: the amount, the reason, the date a response is due, any dispute fee, and on Merchant of Record the share of the sale that is held while the dispute is open. That share is returned if the dispute is won.

If you have anything that shows the buyer received and used what they paid for (usage logs, receipts, your terms as the buyer saw them), add it to the dispute in the console before the answer-by date. INVO decides what to include and sends the response; you never need to contact the card processor. Keep files small: the whole response can carry only 4.5 MB of files. You can add evidence until INVO responds, and each addition is kept. Purchases through a storefront have no disputes in INVO.

API: GET /api/dev/disputes, GET /api/dev/disputes/{dispute_id} and POST /api/dev/disputes/{dispute_id}/evidence, with your developer sign-in.