There are a lot of options out there when it comes to processing subscription payments, but which ones will truly work the hardest for your business?
As the digital ecosphere continues to mature and evolve, so too does the opportunity for businesses looking to capitalize. The subscription economy has increased by more than 100% every year over the past several years, with 15% of all shoppers having signed up for at least one digital subscription. To put that into perspective, the subscription economy is currently hovering around a $12-$15 billion dollar industry.
With that kind of money being generated, choosing the correct payment platform is critical to getting set up and turning on quickly. Where the trouble can sometimes occur is that there are lots of varying features payment platforms can offer you at lots of different rates, so it’s important that you have a clear understanding of what it is specifically that can help benefit subscription ecommerce businesses, and whether or not some of the other elements are worth the overall cost. The last thing you want to do is be paying too much for services you don’t need or leaving money on the table because you’re not using the right tools.
In this article, we’ll highlight some of the key elements that make a payments platform a good fit for your subscription business.
1. Flexible Pricing
As competition rises and the economy changes, your business will likely be re-evaluating your current subscription prices and making changes. When the time comes to make the modification, you’ll want a platform that can implement this as seamlessly as possible without causing any friction to your current customers. The last thing you want to have to do is tackle this task manually.
2. Facilitates Promotions & Trials
Somewhat related to the point above; in order to remain competitive, you will likely need to offer your potential customers some sort of incentive before they agree to start paying you on a recurring basis. Whether that comes in the form of a free trial, a discount for a certain period of time, or a special promotion if they enter a code or sign up at a certain time, you’ll want to make sure your payment processing platform has a way to automate this.
3. Highly Integrated
It’s paramount that your solution can integrate with other key business applications, like your invoicing or ERP software, your CRM, and any other important tools that play a part in payment processing. Additionally, even if you’re using an existing payment gateway like Stripe or PayPal and supplementing it with a solution that will help enhance the subscription billing portion, you’ll want to make sure it can integrate with those gateways without creating more work for you.
4. Detailed Analytics
To most effectively reduce customer churn, you’ll want to have a clear understanding of what is and isn’t working with your subscription business, and a vital part of this resides within analyzing payment trends. Simply having basic insights that only give you a general overview isn’t enough to effectively optimize your efforts. You’ll want detailed analytics that can provide you with insights on all the granular areas of a customer’s journey and lifecycle.
5. Custom Checkout Experience
When using out-of-the-box payment solutions, in many cases the checkout page will be redirected back to the third party, meaning users could get confused when leaving your website and seeing a different company name appear when they’re at their point of purchase. It’s important that your subscription payments platform has the ability to create a branded and seamless customer experience for your business.
6. Dunning Management
A critical part of any subscription business is to mitigate churn, and a surprisingly large amount of churn can result from issues with the card on file, like the card expiring or hitting its maximum limit. Payments platforms that offer dunning management – a safeguard for engaging users about issues with their credit card – will help keep unintentional customer churn low and healthy.
7. Multiple Payment Options
As the ecommerce realm evolves, so too does the way people pay for their goods and services. People now have more ways than ever before to transact with businesses. They can use crypto currency, PayPal, Apple Pay, or various other forms of alternative payments besides a standard credit card. If you want to maximize the amount of conversions, you’ll want to make sure that your payments platform can accept a wide array of different payment methods.
8. PCI Compliant
Last but certainly not least – it is absolutely imperative that your payments platform maintains adequate levels of PCI compliance: especially if they’re providing a vault to store the credit card data. Because subscription businesses store customer’s financial information, a failure to uphold proper PCI standards may result in fines of as much as $100,000 per month. If you’re stuck with a payments platform that doesn’t manage this for you, you may quickly find yourself in over your head trying to managing this.
Finding a reliable payments platform that can offer you all of the above elements doesn’t have to be a long and labor-intensive search. The Origins Ecommerce payments platform can deliver these components while also providing you with additional resources to help you scale your ecommerce business, like a billing support team and a services team dedicated to helping you continuously optimize your payments engine.
If you’re interested in seeing more that Origins Ecommerce has to offer, book a demo today and find out all of the various ways you can sell more online!
