These days, any organization that wants to sell software and digital goods online needs to take recurring payments online—it’s just the way things go. But when it comes to accepting recurring credit card payments, learning how to set up these recurring payments for your business is just the beginning. Companies need to go far beyond that basic step in order to succeed with recurring payment processing and build a healthy online business that will stick around for the long term.
Let’s take a look at the many ways that are available to accept recurring payments and specifically recurring subscription payments online.
Why Take Recurring Payments Online?
Before we look at how to take recurring payments online, let’s ask why we would want to do that in the first place. It’s a fact that subscriptions and recurring payments have been a hot topic for a while—eCommerce accounted for 16% of all commerce and more than half of retail market gains in 2019, according to DigitalCommerce360. In addition, Fuel by McKinsey estimates that the subscription economy is worth up to $15 billion and grew 30% from 2017 to 2018. That’s a market you can’t afford to miss.
Benefits of Recurring Payments
It’s not just the growth in subscription payments that makes them worth exploring, it’s also the many benefits they offer to your business. Recurring and subscription payments have a variety of useful benefits for businesses and customers alike. Perhaps most importantly, subscriptions provide a consistent and predictable source of revenue for companies, helping them plan for growth. Because recurring card payments are automated, they’re simple for customers to manage. Best of all, seamless subscriptions give your customers easy access to software and services anytime, anywhere, without further effort on your part.
How to Accept Recurring Payments: The Best Way to Accept Recurring Payments Online
Here at 2Checkout, we’d obviously love for you to think that the best way to accept recurring payments online is the 2Checkout recurring payment platform. Still, there are many other recurring payment services available, and it’s important to find the one that’s right for your business. Here are some things to look for when choosing your automated recurring payments solution.
Assess Platform Fees
Recurring payment processing delivers a simple experience for customers, but it can get quite complex behind the scenes. That’s because it involves ensuring a seamless payment experience every month (or whatever your subscription period is) and executing some sophisticated retry logic in the event that a payment method fails. With recurring subscription payments in place, companies will be able to count on a reliable source of valuable revenue – look at the subscription management capabilities you receive and check how much value you’re getting for the platform fees paid.
Think Global from the Start
If you want to accept recurring payments on website transactions, you’ll need to keep in mind that customers could be visiting your website from anywhere. This means that in order to receive recurring payments from customers anywhere in the world, you’ll need to develop a level of expertise in international tax law or select an automated recurring payments platform that handles all of these details for you. Some recurring payment processing companies may provide services only in some regions or charge additional fees for international transactions, so make sure to check into what’s covered and what fees apply before you get started.
Another aspect that you need to take in consideration is localization. Make sure that your subscription engine is able to talk to your customers in their language, from emails and supported currencies to local payment methods and localized customer support. This will help you gain trust from your customers, make it easier to convert and increase authorization rates.
Ensure Payment Compliance
Subscriptions are incredibly easy and convenient, but they also require a high level of customer trust. In order to accept recurring credit card payments safely, you should make sure to select a subscription payment provider that is compliant with industry security and privacy standards, both globally and in specific regions. Most reputable platforms will assuredly be PCI compliant, but you’ll also want to look into how platforms handle important data security measures like GDPR and PSD2 and also card brand mandates, like Card-on-file that will help a lot when it comes to SCA. This is the only way you can do business globally with confidence.
Ultimately, the best way to set up recurring payments is for you to choose a trusted payment provider and set up the subscription platform in the way that works best for your business. Most companies, especially smaller businesses, won’t have the knowledge or capacity to set up an effective recurring payments system from scratch on their own. There are many platforms that specialize in recurring payments for small business, so companies of any size can benefit from the shift to the subscription economy. Start looking into platforms now!
Recurring and subscription payments are clearly the future of payments, especially for digital goods and, especially, services. Any company that hasn’t figured out how to accept recurring credit card payments is at risk of falling behind industry competitors and missing out on valuable revenue and strong customer relationships.
Make today the day you accept recurring revenue.
Check out this eBook for more tactics and tools to help you improve recurring revenue, reduce churn, and ultimately grow your business!
