NMI WebFlow Integration for Seamless ecommerce Payments

Seamless checkout is the number one need of modern ecommerce businesses today. Checkout processes can make or break a customer’s purchase experience on your store. Faster, smoother, and unambiguous payment pages are what successful businesses seek.

When checkouts are inflexible, problems arise. Modern businesses are increasingly selling subscription products, and many are offering one-time and subscription products side by side. This demands a payment infrastructure that supports both payment types.

Merchants selling through WebFlow face the same challenge. They need a flexible checkout and a payment gateway that can process high-volume transactions with ease. SubscriptionFlow makes this possible for them.

SubscriptionFlow connects WebFlow merchants to the NMI gateway which is popular for its high-risk friendliness and ease of integration with shopping carts. It also connects them with automatic subscription management to go with seamless payment processing.

Together, SubscriptionFlow, NMI and WebFlow create a recurring payment ecosystem that supports easy checkouts and lifetime customer management for merchants.

What’s Special About the NMI-WebFlow Combo?

WebFlow is great for building storefronts that are highly customizable. It doesn’t lock store-builders into strict templates, meaning, they can be more creative with how they design their product pages and checkout flows. But WebFlow is limited to building the front-end customer experience only.

What happens at the back end is the responsibility of the payment gateway. NMI is a great gateway choice for WebFlow stores because its payment processing flexibility matches with WebFlows customizability. NMI allows merchants to get connected with two or more payment processors at the same time.

This results in fewer payment hiccups as multiple processors decrease the possibility of payment declines. If one processor fails or declines transaction, it is re-routed to the other. As a result, merchants enjoy faster payments, and lesser risk of payments getting stuck in the gateway.

What’s more, NMI allows white-label branding which is rare among global payment gateways. Due to this feature, merchants can match their checkout to their store brand, and create a more natural and put-together checkout flow.

What Happens Without a Subscription Management Layer

NMI and WebFlow work well together, but sadly that’s not entirely true for subscription businesses, or stores selling hybrid products (subscription and one-time). What these two platforms can do is checkout handling and payment authorization. They can’t manage a subscription lifecycle because that’s not what they are designed for.

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Only a subscription management system can fill this gap. In the absence of such a platform, problems like these arise for subscription-based stores:

Subscription not getting created after checkout

One of the biggest cons is surely the lack of automation. Without a subscription management layer, your store, checkout and payment gateway seem stitched together by hand. There’s no seamless way to create and manage subscriptions. So when a customer orders, fills checkout page and pays, it’s the merchant’s duty to keep a record of their payment in a spreadsheet.

Once the payment record is there, the merchant then creates the subscription manually. There is no payment-to-subscription conversion switch. This causes problems as customers grow because missed payment records can lead to missed subscription renewals.

No support for recurring billing schedules

Upon payment confirmation, the customer’s billing schedule also needs to be planned out in a spreadsheet with their future billing dates listed. Billing is not automatically recurring as merchants have to initiate charges themselves each time a payment is due.

Manual plan upgrades and downgrades

If a customer decides to switch to a new plan, their entire subscription record needs to be changed by hand. Their billing dates and invoice amounts need to be updated, as well as their order data so that they are delivered the accurate product/service.

No system for generating recurring invoices

Another drawback is that the merchant needs to create invoices manually, each month. This is very time-consuming, impractical if you have significant customer volume, and prone to human error.

Manual handling of failed payments

There’s nothing much WebFlow stores can do about payment failures. They would need to resolve failures by reaching out to the customer via manual emails/messages/calls and request payments. This is very inefficient compared to automatic payment retries which require no manual effort from the merchant.

How SubscriptionFlow Connects NMI with Webflow

SubscriptionFlow does two things for WebFlow merchants. First, it connects WebFlow stores to NMI so they can process recurring payments. Second, it offers the subscription management layer without which their subscription payment setup is incomplete. When WebFlow and NMI join hands through SubscriptionFlow, this is how the subscription workflow goes:

1. A customer visits a store powered by WebFlow. They select items to purchase from the store, add them to their cart and then proceed to the payment page. This payment page is backed by SubscriptionFlow.

2. When they reach the checkout, they fill in the required details, including their card or digital wallet details.

3. After filling everything out, they click to pay. As soon as they do that, NMI processes their charge.

4. NMI saves this customer’s payment information, and converts it into tokens. SubscriptionFlow saves this tokenized information. SubscriptionFlow also automatically creates a subscription profile for the customer, and assign this profile the billing schedule attached to their selected subscription plan.

5. Because the customer’s tokenized payment data is saved in SubscriptionFlow, it initiates recurring payment attempts whenever the customer’s next billing date arrives. Each recurring charge is processed through NMI.

6. Merchants enjoy recurring charges, NMI’s payment security, and SubscriptionFlow’s subscription lifecycle management.

This setup works even if there are one-time purchases involved. SubscriptionFlow easily bills for both one-time and recurring purchases. One-time payments end at checkout, while the recurring can be tracked in SubscriptionFlow. The invoices are also dynamically created, meaning, they adjust to the billing changes, and present a correct breakdown of charges.

Tangible Business Benefits of This Integration

Webflow merchants gain significant advantages by partnering with NMI through SubscriptionFlow. The most obvious benefits are:

• Automated recurring revenue

Merchants don’t need to manage customers’ profiles, subscription statuses, billing details and payment confirmations in spreadsheets. They don’t even need to generate a payment link themselves, or send manual emails to customers to pay on time. All these tasks are replaced by automation.

Merchants enjoy recurring revenue streams every month as their customers are auto-charged. No one needs to remember billing dates, neither the business, nor its customers.

• Flexible subscription models

Since everything is automated, merchants can introduce plan variations that were too complex to be managed manually. They can set up more than one plan, different billing schedules, pricing models and even trials, bundles and promotional campaigns. SubscriptionFlow leaves no room for billing error in any scenario.

• Payment retry logic

Stores can handle payment failures the better way through the payment retry option. When payment retries are activated, customers with failed payments are charged again automatically. NMI carries out the charge when SubscriptionFlow triggers it to do so.

If the customer has the required funds in their account, they are fetched immediately, and if not then, then an automatic failure alert is sent to them.

• Better subscriber visibility

WebFlow stores get a clearer view of their subscription activity. They can track all their key metrics in SubscriptionFlow, such as their payment success and failure rates, subscriber engagement and lifecycle stages, earned and expected revenue, and more.

Why SubscriptionFlow is the Best Fit for This Integration

SubscriptionFlow transforms the basic WebFlow-NMI payment setup into one that can handle recurring charges and complex subscription plans. It provides stores with the recurring revenue infrastructure that ties everything together: checkout, payment processing and subscription management.

Businesses choose SubscriptionFlow for this integration because:

• It doesn’t require coding, can be set up easily
• It unifies subscription billing and revenue reporting together
• It lets merchants price their plans the way they want
• It supports bundle creation and promotional campaigns
• It generates recurring invoices itself, zero manual input required

With SubscriptionFlow powering your checkout, there remains no need to rely on fragmented payment tools.

If you want to combine the creative store-building freedom of WebFlow and the payment reliability of NMI, integrate them using SubscriptionFlow today. Get yourself a recurring payment ecosystem that makes ecommerce growth smarter.