Businesses across the globe offer subscription services to allow customers to pay for their services, and there are plenty of subscription acceptance providers out there. One provider in particular, Zuora, a BlueSnap partner, helps businesses get the most out of subscriptions. Zuora provides a leading monetization suite for modern businesses across all industries, enabling companies to unlock and grow customer-centric business models. Through their industry-leading technology and expertise, Zuora helps global businesses nurture and monetize direct, digital subscriber relationships helping them close more sales.
As a Zuora preferred payments partner, BlueSnap enriches their subscription and recurring billing offering with international payment capabilities and simplifying the payment acceptance for tiered plans, promos and more.
We understand Zuora and the role subscriptions play in your business. This guide explains:
The Business Case for Subscription Payments with Zuora
Zuora Payment Use Cases
Payments Compliance & Security in Zuora
Payment Reporting & Analytics in Zuora
Global Payments Acceptance in Zuora
Zuora Payment Gateway Options: How to Choose the Right Payments Partner
How BlueSnap’s Integration with Zuora Works
The Business Case for Subscription Payments with Zuora
Accepting subscription payments can create a sustainable way for your business to grow. In fact, 40% of online revenue comes from repeat customers. In addition, the right subscription solution can help grow your business by improving authorization rates and eliminating unnecessary fees.
With subscriptions and recurring billing, you have numerous ways to maximize revenue streams for your business with recurring customers and scheduled payments, compared to traditional methods that require customers to come to you for additional purchases. Subscriptions can help you expediate growth in new regions, build a loyal customer base, and increase your revenue. Zuora gives you the technology to build a flexible invoicing process and scale your business through monetization.
Of course, you can’t risk your monetization efforts failing at the point of payment. You need to choose a payment provider to use with Zuora that can help grow your business by improving authorization rates and eliminating unnecessary fees.
Zuora Payment Use Cases
Subscriptions are not one size fits all, and the payments you choose to support them with can’t be either. Zuora offers an array of options for setting up the billing for your subscription programs, including.
Consumption Metered Billing: Advanced consumption, or usage-based billing allows your customers to pay by how much they use what you sell, whether it’s the amount of cloud storage used or classes taken.
Dynamic Paywalls: Create simple registration forms, paywalls and payment forms tailored to each customer’s needs. Test free trials and product configurations to maximize conversions, upsell new features, and retain users with timely offers.
Offers for Acquisition & Retention: In addition to your regular subscriptions, you may need the ability to discount rates or create other offers to attract and retain your customers. All this needs to be reflected in your billing and how you process the payments.
Multichannel Billing: Depending on who you sell to, you may need to bill different customers in different ways. For example, some may be happy to use a digital eCommerce experience, but enterprise businesses may need to be invoiced, requiring different payment functionality.
Payments Compliance & Security in Zuora
Compliance and security for subscriptions is not simple. For example, subscription payments must meet specific compliance requirements, especially related to things like negative option billing. According to a recent review from the US Federal Trade Commission, nearly 76% of companies that market and sell subscription services use at least one dark pattern (a practices that steers, deceives, coerces or manipulates customers into making choices that may not be in their best interest). It is expected that global consumer protection last enforcement authorities will increase regulations and their enforcement against dark patterns.
Security is also a critical issue, as businesses offering subscriptions often allow customers to save payment data. Working with a platform that includes industry-leading fraud solutions and Strong Customer Authentication tools like 3D Secure can aid in preventing potentially fraudulent transactions from occurring. Implementing tokenization is also a valuable way to ensure payment data stays safe by replacing card information with a unique digital identifier.
In today’s world, it is also all too easy to process fraudulent transactions, which results in a loss of revenue for you, so you need to be sure your payments are secure. Using Zuora along with multiple payment providers to process payments in different regions can leave you vulnerable to additional risk.
Incorporating fraud management tools could be pivotal for your business and lead to identifying fraudulent transactions before they happen. BlueSnap’s Global Payment Orchestration Platform works with Kount, an Equifax company, to have fraud prevention built-in to help you maximize legitimate transactions and prevent fraudulent ones. We also have chargeback management and alerts, such as Order Insight and Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR), built-in.
In addition, combining this all with features such as Level 2 & 3 data and 3DS can help authenticate customer data before a transaction takes place. These features can help prevent unauthorized use of cards and protect eCommerce merchants from exposure to payments fraud.
Payment Reporting & Analytics in Zuora
Accurately reporting, reconciling your accounts, and forecasting for the future is a necessary function for your business to continuously grow. To make this function more simplistic is the ability to have all this information under one account, rather than having your data dispersed through multiple accounts creating reporting and reconciliation nightmares.
To simply combat the potential of inefficiencies, you should look for a solution that collects all data within a single comprehensive view. This creates operational efficiencies and puts essential information at the forefront of your business decisions.
Global Payments Acceptance in Zuora
Whether you sell across borders or are looking to, you need a payment solution that offers global payment methods and currencies, a network of banking connections and payment routing to help you avoid fees associated with cross-border transactions. On top of that, you need to have access to reporting that can accurately report on all transactions and reconcile your accounts.
While accepting payment through Zuora’s subscription solution, you need to offer local currencies to provide the right customer experience. Working with a provider that can support these facets of your business on a global scale will reduce unnecessary complexity and risk for your business, while allowing you to grow globally.
Zuora Payment Gateway Options: How to Choose the Right Payments Partner
Zuora has partnered with multiple payment gateways, but not all possess the same feature set. You want to be sure to choose the payment gateway that has the capabilities to help get the most out of subscriptions. Look for these features:
How BlueSnap’s Integration with Zuora Works
Businesses using Zuora for subscriptions and recurring billing can integrate with BlueSnap to accept global payment capabilities. Merchants can automate the entire subscription and recurring payments process and accept more payment types and currencies, allowing them to sell all over the world. They can also benefit from higher authorization rates and unified reporting for easy reconciliation. BlueSnap customers receive a consolidated view of their global business and the ability to streamline operations without the need for multiple payment gateways for each region they sell in.
BlueSnap’s integration with Zuora is powered by our Global Payment Orchestration Platform, enabling businesses to optimize payments wherever they sell and benefit from value-added services. Our flexible payout engine supports various payout and currency options determined by you.
BlueSnap’s platform is fully compliant with all privacy, security and card scheme rules so you know your business complies with industry standards. Plus, we have built-in tax solutions to help you meet regional requirements.
Used together, BlueSnap & Zuora can help your business:
- Grow Predictable Revenue: Secure recurring sales and know transactions will be approved with Account Updater and automated retries.
- Support Any Recurring Payment Model: Customize your payment capabilities to meet your business needs so you can collect repeat payments just how you want to.
- Streamline Operations: Get clear visibility into your business with robust, customizable reporting capabilities for better recognition and planning.
- Expand Globally: Grow your subscription sales in new markets with 100+ currencies, multiple payment types, local card acquiring and more.
The Benefits of Using BlueSnap with Zuora
We understand every business has different needs and there’s no one size fits all when it comes to payments. BlueSnap can meet your specific payment needs while helping you save time and revenue. Here are some of the benefits:
Optimized Payments with Reduced Technical Debt
Whether you’re selling domestically or globally, BlueSnap offers a single account for managing all your payments, including support for multiple countries and use cases. This reduces development costs while still optimizing your payments for success. Everything you need is built-in with no need to develop for additional accounts or countries.
Payment Routing for Increased Sales
If you sell internationally or are looking to, working with a provider that can reduce cross-border fees by leveraging local card acquiring and local currencies is a must. BlueSnap has an established global banking network that enables our proprietary Intelligent Payment Routing and failover. We route transactions to increase the likelihood of approval and even analyze thousands of transactions to further optimize conversions.
Consolidated Reporting
BlueSnap’s payment and transaction reporting offers insights to help you make informed decisions and continuously finetune your sales strategy. You can even create custom reports from our single source of data, simplifying reconciliation and your operations.
How you choose to support payments in Zuora can make a difference to your business. BlueSnap’s Zuora integration is designed to help you reduce costs and increase revenue through our Global Payment Orchestration platform. Contact BlueSnap today to learn how we could be the right provider for your Zuora payments.
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