What To Look For
Before selecting a subscription billing provider, I recommend you consider your goals. Are you looking for a simple, fast, inexpensive solution… or a solution to help grow your revenue?
Looking for Simplicity?
Are payments a headache which you don’t want to worry about any more? You may be looking for an inexpensive and fast solution so you can focus on more important work. I recommend looking at cost, track-record, and ease-of-use for recurring payments.
Looking for Increased Revenue?
Are you looking for ways to increase revenue through subscription billing? The more advanced vendors provide far better customer analytics, and provide ways to improve your customer acquisition and retention. I recommend looking for advanced business intelligence, automated systems to increase customer retention, and support for complex pricing rules.
When reviewing vendors, look for the following features:
Basic Features
- Proven track record - look for hundreds or thousands of successful customers, and a high volume of payments already processed
- Integration and APIs - make sure the solution is reliable, proven to work with your technology stack(s), and reviewed by your technical team
- Pricing - I recommend you use services which have clear, unit-based pricing.
- Reporting - look for historical reports, and the ability to monitor key metrics realtime
- Security and certification - many vendors are PCI Level 1 compliant, which is a good indicator of security. I recommend you also look for independent audits such as SSAE16/SOC1/SAS70 Type II
- Flexibility to support a variety of different pricing rules, tax calculations and service packages
- High quality support for mobile devices
Advanced Features
- Advanced analytics - look for deep insight into customer lifetime value, retention metrics, an ability to benchmark your performance against the industry, and the ability to perform on-the-fly business intelligence queries
- Global support - including multi-language and multi-currency
- Customer portal - offering self-service ability to manage subscription, payment options, service levels, etc.
- Event-based Customer retention functionality, dealing with failed payments, and cancellations
- Tight integration with your accounting / general ledger
- Integration with your customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
- Payment gateways - some vendors have integrated payment gateways, while many providers use 3rd party payment solutions.
All Subscription Billing Solutions
