At Recurly, our goal is to help our clients professionally manage their subscription billing. That means we want you to look your best. To that end, we are thrilled to announce the latest revision of our Hosted Payment Page. The latest version incorporates dozens of enhancements aimed at giving you more flexibility and improving the customer conversion funnel. First, let’s compare the old (left) and the new (right):
The short answer is: Flexibility and Total Cost Of Ownership We’re glad you asked – because this could save you many hours of development, and many curse words before learning the hard way – on your own precious company’s dime. Every payment gateway is designed to handle one-time transactions. Some gateways like PayPal and Authorize.Net [...]
We talk with lots of business owners on a daily basis, and we frequently hear that setting up a merchant account is a time-consuming and painful process. (We constantly hear stories of 4-6 week approval cycles). So, we worked with Intuit Payment solutions to bring an offering to Recurly merchants we believe our customers will [...]
Every so often I hear about a company that wants to bill all their subscribers on the first of the month. Sure, a lot of companies bill on the first of the month. This has its roots in the old school manual invoicing days of yore. In the digital age, there’s almost no excuse to invoice on the first of every month.
This question recently came up at the Freemium Summit on a pricing panel where I spoke; if you are offering a trial or a freemium service, when should you ask your users for a credit card number? Asking for a credit card number is a significant hurdle for most people.
This past week, I’ve heard from multiple customers who offer yearly subscriptions. They took the easy route and implemented it with one time transactions — in other words, the subscription is valid for a year and then never renews. When they find out about Recurly, sometimes they want to simulate that behavior and not have the subscription renew because that’s what their customers are used to. While Recurly can do that, there’s a better way to maximize your retention rate and still keep your customers happy.
More than once, I’ve underestimated the efforts required to create a billing system. I have yet to find a start-up that budgeted correctly for the time and effort to integrate subscription billing. If your startup is new to subscription billing, there are a few key problems you’ll soon encounter. Knowing about these issues will help you budget your development resources appropriately and help you evaluate your recurring billing options.