Technologies for Subscription Payment Management

Subscription merchants preparing a payment optimization strategy for 2025 should focus on three critical pillars: 1. Develop a robust data environment. A deep understanding of payments and customer data is critical for performance monitoring and improvement. - Build dashboards, reports, and alerts to automate insights and reveal optimization opportunities. Consider solutions like Pagos or Optimized Payments if you don't have the resources to do this yourself. - Use granular filters (e.g., customer cohorts, products, PSPs, acquiring entities, BINs, card brand, card type, billing frequency...) to analyze data effectively. - Employ A/B testing to assess the impact of changes. 2. Fine-tune the customer experience. The payment experience starts when customers first encounter your brand, not just when their card is charged. Poor experiences lead to higher churn. - Ensure explicit consent for subscriptions to reduce fraud, chargebacks, and refund rates. - Clearly disclose terms during checkout, in receipts, and emails. - Offer easy controls like cancellations or pauses. Proactively suggest pauses for inactive users to build trust and prevent churn. - These steps enhance customer satisfaction and approval rates. 3. Maximize payment environment best practices. Once your data and customer experience are solid, focus on refining your payment environment. - Use payment orchestration platforms, either proprietary or third party (e.g., IXOPAY, Spreedly, Gr4vy ) to optimize routing and retries at the BIN level. - Implement tools like Butter Payments or FlexPay to improve retry logic and recapture failed payments. Your in-house logic isn't going to keep up with changes in the ecosystem without considerable overhead internally. - Make sure your retry strategy and other payment practices aren't harming your merchant integrity with issuers, leading to lower approval rates - Use account updater tools and migrate to network tokens as they become available. - Offer the right payment methods and authorization currencies globally - Mitigate fraud with comprehensive tools, as high fraud rates harm approval rates. Use tools from Verifi Inc.and Ethoca to reduce your chargebacks, but keep on eye on your fraud notifications too (are you even ingesting this data?) - Share enhanced data with issuers (e.g., American Express, Capital One) - Use correct MCCs for your business. Good luck optimizing, and give me a shout if you want a second pair of eyes on your strategy.

The Otaku Box leveraged Appstle for a stellar experience to its anime fans, with 90% of customer issues resolved in 24 hours and 50% in under an hour, boosting customer retention, wallet share, and CLTV. Safe to say – Appstle Inc. has been a game changer for them. Let’s dive into how they’re using it. 1️⃣ Challenges: • Effective retargeting.  • Ability to offer different types of upsells and downsells. • Seamless implementation of subscription business model (had to resort to multiple third-party solutions to offer convenient ordering experiences to customers/fans) 2️⃣ Strategy and Execution: • Switching to a comprehensive subscription software such as Appstle with 24x7x365 support. • Liz Adkins found switching to Appstle was "probably the least painful" compared to past platform changes, despite the huge task of migrating scores of customer data. The end-to-end transition was completed in a short time. • The auto-billings went through smoothly during the transition from the old platform to Appstle, without any interruption in the end customer experience. • Appstle is built on top of Shopify analytics, providing The Otaku Box with sharp data and insights into their growth, customer behaviour, and revenue engines. 3️⃣ Results: • The Otaku Box has consolidated its subscription management into one platform, eliminating the need for multiple third-party solutions which has reduced complexity. • They now cater to diverse customer preferences and budgets, boosting satisfaction and loyalty. Offering discounts for extended subscriptions encourages long-term commitments, enhancing their recurring revenue and  cash flow stability. • With access to real-time data, they are able to assess subscriber behaviour at a granular level, and incrementally adapt. They can see which products are the most popular, how customers interact with their website, and what factors influence customer retention. • Before Appstle, subscription support was tedious, involving searches across various platforms and documents. Now, the company turns to the Appstle team for all queries. Appstle has transformed The Otaku Box operations, letting them solve complex challenges, offer diverse subscription plans, enhance customer service, and tap into deeper data insights. The personalized and real-time customer support they received from Appstle is also crucial to their success. Are you also facing similar challenges with your subscription business models? If yes, send me a message and we will help you fix them. #customerretention #subscription #ecommerce #shopify #casestudy