Subscriptions, both retail or SaaS, live or die by their payment processing. And making it a seamless process is increasingly tricky in a global marketplace. How do you marry strategy and tech seamlessly to make the global leap? Join industry leaders in our interactive VB Live event!
In developed markets, like the U.S., Canada, and Australia, the subscription service model is low-hanging fruit, with an optimal balance between the value it provides to the company and the value your customer enjoys in return. Not to mention a reliable revenue stream, which for most companies is priceless.
But that value only increases when you’re able to offer your customer flawless service, when it’s easy to subscribe, easy to back out, and most importantly, payments and transactions are seamless.
That’s because the subscription model is based on trust — your user is offering you some of their most valuable and private financial data. They’re handing over their credit card and in return, depending on you to use it exactly as you’ve promised you would, at the same time every month and for the amount they signed up for.
Established markets rely on the largest banks and card issuers, with customers who have access to internationally useful credit and debit cards, and the dominant method of payment is overwhelmingly via credit cards. So that makes it easy to offer safe, secure, and on-time transactions that make it easy to onboard customers and keep them happy in the long term.
There are issues, of course. Cards have expiration dates, often meaning you lose the ability to charge them if your customer doesn’t remember to update. Banks get acquired by other banks, or sell their card portfolios to other banks and the VIN number of the cards change. But the best payment processors are set up to help you set up strategies to manage and mitigate both the business and customer service issues.
But once you start to expand globally, payments become tricky. You’ll find that users don’t have the electronic payment methods you’re set up to use. In the Netherlands, customers want to use bank transfers. In Latin America, the most common way to pay for online services is with gift cards purchased in cash. In some Middle Eastern countries, either the trust in online commerce hasn’t been established so consumers won’t pay for services online, or the local religion simply frowns on using credit cards. In some east Asian countries, banks won’t authorize debit cards for ecommerce.
And then there’s deciding whether you need to collect the funds in local currency as opposed to operating in euros or U.S. dollars, or how to take conversion rates into consideration, and how to buffer fluctuations in the global currency market.
It’s a lot of planning, a lot of strategy, and a whole lot of working with a payment processor who is set up to tackle challenges from wildly varying payment types to currency valuation to local financial regulations and more. And if you don’t get it right, all you’ll see is churn, churn, churn.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. To find out how industry leaders in subscription model pricing and payments marry global-smart pricing and payment strategies with innovative tech solutions that boost growth and secure reliable revenue, join our interactive VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
In this VB Live event, you’ll learn how to:
- Get customers to pick the subscription level you WANT them to
- Mitigate global subscription pricing issues when exchange rates fluctuate
- Create massive, reliable revenue streams, from industry leaders in subscription model pricing
- Create a single payment strategy that will work with millennials, Baby Boomers and tech newbies
Speakers:
- Derek Blatter, senior manager, electronic payments and fraud prevention, Ancestry.com
- Kevin Hennessy, business development director, Worldpay
- Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
Moderator:
- Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat
This VB Live event is sponsored by Worldpay.
