Shopify PayTabs Integration for Subscription-Ready Payments

Subscription businesses expanding in the MENA region often struggle with payments. That’s because global payment gateways and selling platforms are hard to localize, and often don’t support recurring payments. While Shopify is a great global website builder, its built-in payment solutions lack the ability to address modern subscription problems.

The solution? Integration with external, more localized gateways. PayTabs is an unrivalled payment gateway candidate for MENA. It helps businesses flourish in countries like the UAE, Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia by accepting money in local currencies.

Now how to connect PayTabs and Shopify together? The answer is SubscriptionFlow. The SubscriptionFlow app in Shopify makes it easy to access PayTabs for faster time-to-market. With this app, you don’t need any manual workarounds.

Real Payment Struggles of Expanding Shopify Businesses

Customers everywhere like to pay in their local currency; with the methods they are familiar with. It is the same for MENA customers. Shopify businesses that are based in the Middle East, or have Middle Eastern customers face difficulty in localizing payment experiences.

That’s because international payment gateways often don’t support payment methods at a regional level. This may cause checkout friction as the checkout process feels foreign to local clients. Paying in a different currency, and facing payment problems in that currency, such as card declines and payment failures can damage customer trust.

Benefits PayTabs Offers to Shopify Merchants

PayTabs is not just another payment gateway. It is a regional enabler for growing subscription stores. PayTabs helps merchants target the Middle Eastern market with more confidence, ease and precision. Here are some benefits it provides:

Higher approval rates in MENA

With PayTabs, customers’ payments are processed within the MENA region, and are not routed internationally. Since it acts as a regional gateway, it is more trusted by local banks than an overseas processor.

This means that there is higher possibility of payment approval, and lower chances of decline. Moreover, there are no extra authentication processes that the customer has to go through, as is required by overseas processors, leading to faster completion of checkout.

Support for regional payment methods

Unlike global gateways, PayTabs allows accepting payments through local methods popular in MENA. These include local cards, wallets, mobile payment apps and other alternative options. Users who aren’t familiar with international options don’t have to use them by force.

Plus, subscribers can pay in their local currency. They don’t need to convert currencies to understand bills, or worry about fluctuating charges.

You have done your part.
Let SubscriptionFlow take it from here!

Let us help your business grow with our powerful
subscription management software.

Built-in compliance with local regulations

This gateway is fully compliant with the payment laws of MENA. Merchants can operate without chasing compliance manually with a foreign payment setup.

High security

PayTabs is also compliant with international payment security standards such as PCI DSS. It stores customer billing data only in the form of tokens, making it inaccessible to the merchant or other third parties.

And since it stores payment methods of your Shopify customers, they aren’t required to enter payment details every time they make a new transaction, or renew an existing subscription.

SubscriptionFlow Delivers the Missing Piece: Recurring Billing

By connecting PayTabs with Shopify, merchants only solve half of their problems. The other half is subscriptions and recurring billing. The Shopify and PayTabs duo is great at flexible payments, but only one-time payments. There’s no switch for automatic recuring payments or options for subscription lifecycle management. So Shopify’s support basically ends at checkout.

It is SubscriptionFlow that takes care of your subscriptions beyond checkout. Luckily, it is available as a Shopify app, so merchants can install it and sync it with Shopify with zero difficulty.

When SubscriptionFlow becomes your billing engine, it allows you to connect multiple payment gateways with Shopify, PayTabs being one of them. So you get this subscription operations setup:

Shopify for managing front-end sales
PayTabs for processing recurring payments
SubscriptionFlow for handling billing logic and automating payments

How this setup works: Users land on your Shopify store, select the product plan of their liking, and subscribe. At the time of payment, they can see familiar Midde Eastern payment methods at checkout. These methods are enabled through PayTabs, and payment made through them is processed by PayTabs.

Upon each successful payment, a customer and subscription is created inside SubscriptionFlow. This subscription continues beyond checkout, and follows its pre-planned billing schedule. All the billing beyond checkout is automated by SubscriptionFlow, and bills keep getting processed through PayTabs. This ensures smooth-flowing subscription lifecycles.

SubscriptionFlow and PayTabs in Action

The combined abilities of SubscriptionFlow and PayTabs help merchants combat subscription payment complexities. With this integration, stores can give their subscribers a regional payment experience, and the convenience of automation alongside quality product delivery.

This setup enables recurring billing

Merchants can define payment cycles in SubscriptionFlow by week, month or year. Once a plan is selected, the payment cycle attached to it is activated. The billing software initiates payment attempts on the dates the customers’ bills are due. Each payment attempt is carried out through PayTabs, with plans renewing with each successful payment.

Smart retries can be carried out for failed payments

Not only subscription payments, but payment reties are also carried out through PayTabs. SubscriptionFlow initiates retries, with its AI billing agents refining retry timings for you. These retry attempts are processed by PayTabs for faster payment settlement and subscription continuity. This setup helps businesses resolve payment failures on time.

Plan changes get reflected in invoices smoothly

Whether customers change plans, decide to pause, or opt out of subscription, billing in each case is handled automatically by SubscriptionFlow. In the case of plan changes, the software applies proration to charges to make the new plan more easily accessible for customers.

In case of pauses, the software freezes customers’ billing schedules for the selected time frame, and auto-resumes payments when this period expires. Lastly, in the case of cancellations, refunds are easily issued if they are applicable.

Subscription analytics come within reach

In Shopify, subscription stores can analyze their business activity to a limited extent. They don’t go beyond each customer’s first transaction. Then, to track the rest of transactions manually, merchants need to keep an eye on their PayTabs dashboards. These dashboards notify them of payment success and failure.

But even these dashboards don’t tell merchants the whole story, as they are restricted to payment data. SubscriptionFlow resolves this issue by offering full visibility into subscription lifecycles. It offers one, comprehensive dashboard to merchants where they can view all their customers, transactions, revenue-to-date, incoming revenue, predicted cash flow, churn rate, etc.

There’s no need to log in to different dashboards (Shopify’s or PayTabs’) to see separate chunks of data in each. SubscriptionFlow gives you complete business insights.

One-time & recurring payments can be accepted side by side

Stores can accept versatile payments through PayTabs using SubscriptionFlow. Recurring payments are a given, but one-time transactions can also be allowed alongside. These one-time payments can be the result of add-on purchases, or purchase of non-subscription items from your store.

Easier expansion across MENA

With SubscriptionFlow’s checkout and PayTabs’ local payment method support, merchants get to offer regional billing experiences. Familiar billing processes strengthen customer trust, and accelerate growth. Whether you deal with a small, rapidly growing, or large customer base, our billing software makes billing equally simple.

Let your Shopify store flourish across MENA and beyond. Enable PayTabs as your gateway and SubscriptionFlow as your billing engine for high-approval, automatic recurring payments.