Purchasing different products was a pain in the neck before all these online shopping got discovered. You need to go out and find what you need in every store in the city until you get the best of all the deals being offered.
Shopping experience has evolved when shopping malls were built. It gives the buyer a one-stop shop experience. Much to everyone’s delight, online shopping was invented. It’s like combining all the stores in one small-sized area that you can pass by and get whatever it is that you need. You get all the convenience that you need.
Payments system and the subscription billing system somehow works like that.
Switching to automated subscription billing and management is the best thing to do to make invoicing easier. Customers are provided with a portal to change their subscription easily, monthly invoicing is automated, revenue is being recognized in compliance with ASC 606 revenue recognition standards. Everything is being managed by the subscription billing and management solution before payment is even submitted.
Since some automated subscription billing and management system does not have the capability to process payments, the next step is to decide on which payment gateway to use with your billing platform. It needs to be integrated with a third-party payment gateway like PayPal, PayPal Payments Pro, Amazon Payments and Stripe so that credit card payments can be done by customers.
Managing the billing process as a whole, starting from preparing the invoice, all the way to processing of payments, in one solution is the best way to do it.
Setting up and configuring an independent subscription billing solution for a third-party gateway independently is quite a task. A small company would require full understanding and knowledge of two separate systems to run it. There will always be the risk of error in connecting the payment gateway to the subscription billing and management system on your own. And it is also time consuming which will directly affect the businesses’ productivity.
A plug and play system will be helpful to avoid errors and payment delays. Finding a subscription billing and management platform with a fully integrated payment processing solution will be beneficial. All the hard work will be taken cared of.
Late and failed payments is one of the main concerns of every company. There are instances when even the customers desire to continue with their subscription, the opt to drop the service. This is called involuntary churn . This happens to companies with a recurring billing model. Involuntary churn occurs when the credit which customers use to pay their bills expired or gets lost and have not updated the payment method in the system.
Having or asking customers to change their payment details or information cannot be expected always. Most customers see it as a hassle more than its worth. Most feel like it is of less importance, not understanding how it affects businesses. This will directly result in involuntary churn which directly affects and interrupts the revenue stream.
A company loses a lot because of this inconvenience in both company and the customers. Roughly 3% of credit cards expire each month. This means payments are at risk of failing every year only because of expired cards. This is a big problem that most companies are facing and must be thought of with a solution.
Managing the payment process with an account updater feature will be of great importance to avoid involuntary churn. It would allow automatic update on customers’ credit card information. Update will be directly coming from the credit card company with the availability of new card information. This will result in a much safer handling of customer payment information and leaving the hassle of waiting for the customers to update their information in the system. A lot of issues will be bypassed in doing so, especially the involuntary churn.
The risk and fraud problem of a business can be avoided when payments are integrated into the subscription and management ecosystem. The risk reduction algorithm will automatically work every time customers use the hosted registration pages of the subscription billing management solution.
Fraudulent activities can be avoided with the algorithm able to identify threat by using tokens that capture the customers information such as location, IP address and the likes submitted together with the customer’s credit card information. Merchants is benefitting from this with the reduced chargebacks.
Having a one system to manage is the utmost and less tasking thing a merchant can do to be efficient. Having different applications for subscription billing and management systems poses lots of challenges. It creates disjoint and inefficiency in the process which will directly affect the company’s growth. Reaching out to different customer service support for issues will be lessened. This acts as a one-stop shop for all issues related to payment processing, billing, and subscription management. This gets the issues to be resolved faster.
This kind of integration enables the company to focus more on important issues rather than system glitches and problems brought about by using different systems. This is also beneficial when it comes to facilitating the real-time reports of the entire billing lifecycle from invoicing up to when the payment was made.
