Spook Away Processing Horrors for Your Subscription Payments

Is it becoming increasingly challenging for you to come up to the expectations of your recurring customers when it comes to payment processing experience?

And yes! You have heard it right—online payment processing is an experience for customers.

Offering a smooth and frictionless payment processing experience can be a bottleneck or a challenge because of various factors i.e. inapt payment gateways and poor invoicing process.

However, team SubscriptionFlow is here to tell you how to charge recurring customers and make them pay, but before that have a cursory glance over the payment processing challenges.

Also Read: What Are the Online Payment Methods for Automated Recurring Payment Processing and How Do They Work?

Challenges of Payment Processing’s in Subscriptions

Complexity in Invoicing Process

Invoicing is not a one-step process rather it is quite complex. Let’s just start by looking at what must be the part of the invoice:

A unique invoice number
Company name and logo
Details regarding the customer purchase
Data when the invoice is issued
The due date for the payment against this invoice

Many other things need to be part of your invoice depending on the nature of your business. Even if you use some automated recurring payment solution, the complexities remain there for you to deal with. At every step, the customer data needs to be used and kept tracked. Any mistake in an invoice means killing customer relations with your own hands. Because a mistake in the invoice will prolong the process of generating the invoice and the payment against this invoice.

The solution to deal with invoicing complexities is to go for consolidated invoices—meaning the invoice that is being generated against a number of purchases rather than invoicing against every purchase. Of course, customers can choose to opt or not for consolidated payments.

As it has been mentioned that invoice processing can vary from business to business so, as a subscription business, you must know how payment processing work against the invoices that the system generates.

Payment Failures

Payment failure is a common issue that many recurring customers face these days. Their payments do not get processed because of any technical issue from the merchant’s side or even on the customer’s side. The following are some common causes of payment failures:

Inauthentic customer information
Distortion in the internet connection
Payment method not supported
Insufficient amount in the customer account
Expiry of the credit or the debit card
Down payment gateway services

There can be other technical reasons for the payment failure. However, the sole solution is to allow automated payment retries. Sometimes, customers try to pay their subscription fees but when the payment gets failed, the payment orchestration platforms do not let them retry to pay. They get their subscriptions cancelled—involuntary churn. Bringing these customers back is not easy because reverting involuntary churn is more difficult than reverting voluntary churn.

Also Read: Scaling Subscription Business With Easier, Faster, and Smarter Recurring Payments Processing

Difficulty in Revenue Recognition

The payment processing has its strings attached to billing, invoicing, and revenue. If you want to maintain the flow of recurring revenue, then you will have to streamline payment processing. And when payment processing needs to be smooth and easy, then you will need to work on billing and invoicing as well. The sustained growth of revenue is a way to earn profits as well as to attract investors. There are involved various accounting processes. When you integrate accounting applications and software with your recurring payment solution, things can stay on track from billing to recurring revenue management.

How to Fight Payment Processing Horrors?

Now that we have discussed the payment processing horrors in detail, it is time to shed light on some ultimate solutions to payment processing issues.

1. Multiple Payment Gateway Integrations

Whether you need payment processing for SMBs or a large subscription-based enterprise, you need to integrate more than one payment gateway with your recurring payment processing solution. It is a tip for even startups to integrate more than one payment gateway. Why? Because the ultimate goal of all businesses is growth and business scaling. And when small businesses grow, new customers demand multiple payment methods and payment gateways to ensure that their account information is secure. So, integrate various gateways so that when the opportunity knows, you are already ready!

2. Multiple Payment Methods

The next thing to fight the challenges of payment processing is to offer your customers multiple payment methods. In the subscription business market, there are people belonging to different age groups and generations. They prefer varying payment methods, and you need to cater to them all. They want eCheck payment processing, cards, and even digital currency to pay their recurring charges. How? By allowing them to pay through the payment method of their choice. And to offer multiple payment methods, you need the integration of multiple payment gateways.

3. Fraud Prevention

When it comes to payments, the factor of fraud and malpractices cannot be neglected. So, you need to minimize payment fraud to optimize payment processing and smooth flow of the recurring revenue. You can opt for hosted payment pages (HPPs) to minimize payment fraud and such practices.

Also Read: Recurring Payment Challenges? Switch to the Ultimate Subscription Management and Payment Processing Platform

If you want recurring payment orchestration and smooth payment processing in the SaaS subscription business market, then SubscriptionFlow offers its subscription billing and payment processing platform for people like you. Schedule a demo with SubscriptionFlow so that we will show you how you can fight back your payment processing horrors.