Payment Page Improvements

You’ll notice the new version is much more visually appealing. Some of the other improvements include:

• Uploadable logo
• Client-side form validation for required fields and credit card validity
• Improved settings for Google Analytics to ensure your cookies are read/set properly
• Optionally display more fields: company/organization name, phone number, and VAT number
• Optionally hide email address if email is set on URL parameters or otherwise known for the account code
• Additional credit card type logos for international merchant accounts.

All of these revisions are designed to make the page more flexible for your needs and make it easier for your customers to subscribe to your service.

As we deployed this new page template, we wanted to respect the effort some of our merchants already put into customizing their CSS for the hosted pages. We versioned the page so you may choose between the original payment page (using your existing CSS) or the new version. If you have customized any of your CSS, the page will default to the previous version. To upgrade or customize the fields, log into your Recurly account, click the Configuration tab at the top, then select Hosted Payment Pages. The settings can be different for your test site and your production site, so feel free to experiment on your test site before updating your settings on the production site.

What would you like to customize?

At the moment, the new version does not allow you to customize the CSS. If there are pieces of the new page that you would like to customize, but can’t today, please let us know. We would love to hear your feedback on the new page. We are especially interested in hearing from you if the new page helps improve your conversion rates.

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  offer recurring billing or subscription billing functionality, and while they generally work for simple recurring billing integrations, we’d like to explain what you should expect to receive by signing up with Recurly rather than integrating directly with your payment gateway.

Recurly is designed as a complete billing system for recurring billing. This means that we have put careful thought and consideration into the most common pain-points experienced by business owners handling the day-to-day billing and related customer support issues that can come along with subscription billing.

Consider this – Unlike payment gateway solutions, Recurly lets you handle all of the following scenarios elegantly:

1. Customers upgrade and downgrade between plans easily – Recurly handles proration and customer communications
2. Billing cycle changes (e.g. customer signs up for monthly plan and elects to change to yearly plan)
3. Easily issue customer credits towards future service
4. Create email invoices
5. Easily process refunds
6. Process one-time transactions
7. Customizable hosted payment pages for customers to subscribe & update their billing info
8. Provide billing support with an account management console for your customer support
9. Easily change payment gateways without any business interruption. Recurly stores your data safely and securely.
10. Keep your own systems easily in sync with secure XML notifications and/or emails.

Things To Consider Before Building Homegrown Billing Solution

Here are some common pitfalls when estimating the work required to build your own solution:

Customer Upgrades and Downgrades

Most businesses prefer to offer multiple subscription plans. It’s good practice to create a ‘migration path’ from an easy, no risk trial to the plan with the plan with the maximum expected lifetime value. This is great business practice, but the billing intricacies are non-trivial.

Let’s start with proration, it means prorating the current month’s charge against the current payment — this can get complicated quickly once you also factor in trial periods. If your customers decide it’s too much and want to downgrade, you might want to wait until the end of the current billing cycle — now you’re tracking state. These simple tasks can take months to build on your own; Recurly gracefully handles these situations with a single API call.

Failed Payments

Recurring billing APIs typically leave you in the dark when a payment fails. On average, 5-10% of your payments will fail every month due to changed credit card numbers, expiration dates, and accounts overdrawn.  (The longer the billing cycle, the higher the failure rate.) As part of offering a subscription service, you need to follow up with these subscribers to keep their billing information accurate. Recurly makes it easy to follow up with your past due accounts and gracefully collect their new billing info which eliminates costly customer service overhead.

Account Management

Subscriptions come with customer support requirements. This is a commonly underestimated cost, and Recurly makes it much easier for your company to manage without building out expensive custom solutions. Your customer service dept. can view subscription information, issue credits & refunds, and more. Any change made in Recurly will be pushed back to your web application with our Push Notifications and REST API.

Employee Retention

We like the business we’re in, but we’ve never claimed that billing is sexy.  It turns out that many of our customers have come to us AFTER having built homegrown subscription billing solutions. Beyond the expected engineering and customer service challenges outlined above, the net effect on an organization is low employee retention. Engineers typically want to work on the company’s core product. After spending 3-6 months in the “billing department”, many engineers naturally seek new employment.
When you outsource your subscription billing to Recurly, you’ll dramatically reduce your total cost of ownership related to each of these areas.

• Engineering Development Time
• Ongoing Engineering Management and Maintenance
• Customer Service and Support
• Recruiting and Training to get new (replacement) employees up to speed.

Sign up for Recurly.

It’s free to sign-up, and priced to pay-as-you-go. Your business will thank you.

Instead of 4- 6 weeks, how about a 24 -48 hour approval time? Better yet, check this out -

• No application, sign-up or cancellation fees
• Extremely competitive rates (Intuit provides both merchant account and payment gateway, so no duplicate fees)
• One-Click integration with your Recurly Subscription Billing Account
• Automatic integration with QuickBooks accounting software

Intuit Subscription Billing Solution details here.

The good folks at Intuit really like what Recurly is doing for small business owners – particularly that we’ve made it much easier for merchants to launch subscription businesses.  So, they’ve stepped up with a really compelling offer and a 1-800 phone number to make your merchant account provisioning as quick and painless as you can imagine.

There is really no reason to live with less than spectacular payment processing. Intuit is a great solution for merchants in the United States, looking to serve customers from anywhere in the world.

-Get going with subscriptions!

The Recurly team

Press Release

Ask an accountant if they like to see a steady stream of revenue coming in every single day, or if they prefer giant monthly lump sums. The answer is that a constant revenue stream is much better for cash flow. From the user’s perspective, they would rather see round numbers like $99 on their credit card statement instead of prorated charges like $54.16 that look unfamiliar.

What happens if the user decides to cancel in the first month of service? If you prorate your monthly dues and the user decides not to renew before the month is up, you’ve lost some additional revenue that the subscriber already agreed to pay because you did not charge for the full term.

From the developer’s perspective, it’s also much easier to deal with whole subscription terms than it is to worry about the shortened, pro-rated term lengths. At Recurly, we are very big fans of reducing the complexity for programmers — they should be focused on developing your service, not on edge cases of subscription billing.

But what about services doing usage-based, or metered, billing? The usage counter would traditionally be reset at the first of every month, hence the need to prorate to first month. Instead, what if the usage counter was simply reset when the subscription renewed? Bingo, problem solved.

So make your accountants, developers, and subscribers happy… keep it simple and forget about billing everyone on the first of the month.

Asking for a credit card number is a significant hurdle for most people. High fall off rates are to be expected. But once someone gives you a card number and starts a trial, they are more likely to convert to a paid subscriber at the end of the trial. So, if you are optimizing for your conversion numbers from trial to paid, then collect the credit card at the beginning of the trial.

If you offer a trial period and require your users to upgrade before the end of the trial, you will get more people in the door and trying your service. However, it’s very difficult to get someone to come back before the end of the trial to enter their card number. At least the number of total users will be much higher; use this as an opportunity to collect more feedback from your free users, especially the ones that declined to upgrade.

If you are able to offer your users an indefinite, free version, then you can wait to collect the credit card number when the user is ready to upgrade and convert to a paid subscriber. You benefit from getting the most people in the door and will have the most opportunities to ask the user to consider upgrading.

At the end of the day, you need to factor in the costs associated with the free trial, the viral-ity of your product, and the likeliness of a conversion when deciding when to collect their credit card number. You’ll get the highest retention rate when you can reach the customer the most (while providing value, not annoyance).

If your users forget about your service during the year and then they see the yearly renewal on their statement, they’re going to remember your service… and not in a good way. Worse yet, they might want their money back. That usually means they’ll ask you for a refund (and you should be willing to issue it if they really haven’t used the service) or they’ll attempt a charge-back (and that sucks for you and your bank account).

So right before the yearly subscription renews, remind your users two weeks ahead of time about the upcoming charge. This gives them plenty of time to opt-out of the subscription. It also gives you a chance to remind them of the value you provide so they will continue paying for the service. It’s just that easy to keep everyone happy and make more money.

And yes, Recurly will be adding this feature before your yearly subscriptions get close to expiration.

1. Signup for a recurring billing service
2. Create a signup form that accepts the billing information
3. Create a page for the user to update their billing information
4. Allow the user to cancel their subscription
5. Sell your product or service and money

The above will get you up and running with subscriptions.  However, there’s a lot missing from the above picture that you won’t realize until you roll out your new billing system.  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.

Declined Recurring Payments
For starters, what happens when one of the recurring payments fails due to a declined or expired credit card?  Will your system know to alert the user and/or cancel their subscription?  Can you get a list of past due accounts?  And, will the system continue billing the user or will it stop until their payment information is updated?

When a card is declined during the subscription renewal, you need to alert the customer and give them a way to update their billing information.  If they update their billing information in a timely manner, then bill them the missed amount.  Otherwise, the appropriate action is to cancel their subscription and transition their account back to a free account.  Unfortunately, many recurring billing APIs make it non-trivial to determine if a recurring payment failed.  And, if the user updates their billing information, verify that the service will collect the missing payment — this should happen immediately as part of the billing info update process.

Upgrades and Downgrades
If your site offers multiple subscription types, billing intervals, or quantities, then your customers are guaranteed to ask for upgrades and downgrades of their subscription.  If you start offering your subscriptions without a means for the subscriber to modify their own subscription, then you’ll receive several support requests.  Hopefully your support staff has the tools to modify the subscriptions or else you will miss the opportunity to make more money by allowing your users to upgrade.  And, a few users will be more than unhappy.

Of course, not all recurring billing APIs will allow you to upgrade or downgrade like you would expect.  Typically, an upgrade (additional quantity, add-ons, or service level) should happen immediately.  To do that, the remainder of the current term needs to be prorated and billed immediately.  Not all recurring billing services do this — some will require you to wait until the renewal to charge a new amount.

Downgrades or billing cycle changes can be just as tricky.  These events typically occur at the end of the current billing cycle, since the customer has already committed to paying for their current term.  These changes are doable with almost all recurring APIs, but most services will require you to perform the calculations to get the changes just right.  Buffer for some development time and lots of testing here.

Customer Service Tools
Does your billing system give your support staff the ability to lookup and modify accounts?  Your subscribers will want you to make changes (either by contacting you with a phone call or email) on their behalf.  If it takes an engineer to make subscription changes because you haven’t built the tools for your support staff to handle the modification, then you’re not using your resources efficiently.  Other users will expect your support staff to be able to offer them credits or refunds if something should go amiss.  Your support staff should be able to handle these requests immediately to minimize any chances of chargebacks or upset customers.  I strongly encourage you to give your support staff the tools necessary to support billing requests without involving a developer with database access.

Reporting and Metrics
Are you tracking your subscriber metrics?  Your payment gateway will tell you about the dollars and cents moving through your account but it doesn’t know anything about subscribers.  You’ll want to know as much as you can about new signups, upgrades and downgrades, cancellations, missed payments, failed subscribe attempts, etc.  Out of the box, most recurring billing services fail to provide these reports.