The term “recurring payments” gets searched for 4k times on an average per month. Pretty sure if you search for other such related terms like recurring billing, recurring invoicing, subscription payments etc the sum total of all these keywords will be an impressive number. Recurring payments have become pretty popular in the past few years. Customers are looking for ways to stop them (when they see an unrecognized charge on their credit card) and businesses are looking for ways to transform single payments business models to subscription-based business models with recurring payments.
Recurring payments are the heart and soul of a subscription business. If not everything, a lot revolves around them; such as important subscription business KPIs like subscription churn rate, MRR, CLV. If there’s churn then that means the average monthly recurring revenue will decrease. (and we don’t want that)
What is a subscription?
A subscription is an agreement between you and your customer for future transactions, which is common in subscription-based business model like product-as-a-service. From a technical perspective, you offer a product and instead of a one-time payment, payment is collected monthly by your choice of payment service provider (like Stripe, Braintree, etc).
Now this is where things get interesting (and complicated); if collecting payment every month on a fixed date every month was the only task a PSP had to do, running a subscription business would be pretty straightforward: connect your shop to a PSP and Voila - you have a recurring business model. But as is, collecting payments on a fixed date is NOT THE ONLY transaction related activity in a subscription business. This is where circuly fills the missing gap.
Circuly makes PSP smart for running subscriptions and enables them to do a lot more besides collecting payment every month on a fixed date.
1. Circuly Feature: Charge One-Time Transactions
Your customers may get a speeding ticket for their car subscription or require repair support for which you need to charge a one time transaction. Since most payment service providers do not support one-time transactions, it is nearly impossible to set up an automated payment collection process for one-time payments. The alternative route taken by most subscription businesses is to send an invoice to their customers and wait for them to pay up.
However, with circuly’s internal payment logic we enable you to collect one-time transactions through your payment service providers fast, hassle-free and without annoying your customers with payment reminder emails.
Easily collect due payments by charging the "saved payment token" of your customer. The customer is notified via email and receives an invoice for the same. Make sure that you inform your customer about the upcoming charge so that your customer isn't taken by surprise with when they see a charge on their card.
2. Circuly Feature: Refund
Issuing refunds is a common operation in subscription management. But normally it is not possible to process a refund fast and in an efficient manner. With circuly’s internal payment logic, you can issue a refund to your customer with just a few clicks. With this circuly feature, we enable you to:
- Issue a partial or full refund
- Select the order (in case there are multiple connected to a Customer) that needs to be refunded.
- Trigger automatic invoice generation.
- Automatically send the invoice to the email address connected with the order.
- Add a custom note in the invoice to inform the customer about the refund.
A happy customer is a returning customer.
3. Circuly Feature: Change Recurring Payment Amount
Typically recurring payment amounts once set and created cannot be changed within the payment service provider limiting your business case options such as providing a special discount to your customers during off season days to reduce seasonal churn. Another common case in physical product subscription is when a customer upgrades their level of subscription (for example changing the length of the subscription) and as a result the price needs to be adjusted.
With circuly, recurring payments can be easily changed and altered.
Having the possibility to change recurring payments gives you the opportunity to do more for your customers and keep them with your subscription business as long as possible.
Scaling a subscription business boils down to having the right tools that enable you to do a lot more. With flexible recurring payment operations you can develop pricing strategies that give you an edge in the market.
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