The Complete Subscription Automation Platform for Magento Retailers

Magento helps retailers with everything that a good storefront requires: product listings, shopping cart, checkout etc. Retailers looking for more revenue opportunities and ongoing customer relationships can set up subscription-based stores. The only problem is that Magento doesn’t help with subscription stores as much as it does with one-time sales.

That’s because the work of subscription-based retailers doesn’t stop at checkout. In fact, it’s never ending. But Magento’s support doesn’t extend beyond checkout. Due to this, merchants need a third-party subscription management solution that can see to their customers’ ongoing subscription cycles.

SubscriptionFlow stands out as the complete subscription automation platform in this regard. Let’s dive into the details.

Why Magento Retailers are Embracing Subscriptions

Subscriptions are taking ecommerce by storm because they are a source of recurring revenue. Retailers prefer to have an ongoing relationship with their buyers so that they can generate income from one buyer multiple times. Due to benefits like these, merchants on Magento are also embracing the subscription model. They are selling products like:

• Subscription boxes
• Auto-replenishing products
• Online recurring service deliveries
• Memberships
• SaaS-style digital services

When products like these are sold on a recurring basis, it helps customers stay connected and loyal to a single merchant for a specific item. This is in contrast to one-time purchases because they are occasional, and don’t encourage customers to return. So naturally, subscription-based merchants have better customer retention.

This retention leads to predictable income as well which is important for the store’s inventory management and future cost planning. In this way, subscriptions create a more stable and sustainable business model.

eCommerce sites like Magento are also increasingly being used today for setting up subscription-based storefronts so that merchants can sell and manage subscriptions easily. But in reality, when it comes to managing subscriptions, there are a lot of features that these platforms lack. That’s because running a subscription business needs much more than simply listing products online. This brings us to our next section:

Challenges Magento Retailers Face

When selling subscriptions without a dedicated management platform, there are many complexities that retailers have to face:

Handling recurring billing cycles

Recurring billing cycles require a lot of manual effort to run smoothly. After your customers complete purchases in your Magento store, you need to save their details like billing date in a spreadsheet. Then, you need to constantly monitor this spreadsheet to check which billing dates are upcoming.

When a billing date arrives, you need to create an invoice and send it to the customer, and ask them to pay for plan renewal. Customers may take longer than expected to pay, delaying your income. Then, when the next billing date arrives, the same cycle repeats.

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Subscription lifecycle management

Other than invoicing and billing, there are others aspects to a subscription lifecycle as well. For example, changes in subscription initiated by the customer. When customers wish to change their billing date, customize their subscription duration, change their delivery address, pause their plan or cancel subscription altogether, these are changes that merchants need to address proactively. Delay in fulfilling customer requests can create feelings of distrust.

Payment failures and dunning issues

Merchants also need a way to resolve payment failures. In a recurring payment model, payment failures are expected. They commonly occur due to expired cards or insufficient bank balance. Now those retailers managing everything manually risk losing their customers due to failures because they can’t retry payments automatically.

Managing renewals and plan changes

Renewals need to be quick and instant. If a customer pays on the 5^th of a month for subscription renewal, their plan should renew right after payment, not after an hour or on the next day. Manual processes lack such speed and efficiency.

Similarly, if a subscriber wants to change their plan, they should be able to get out of their existing plan instantly, and access their new plan without delay.

Why Magento Needs a Subscription Management Layer

Having a subscription management layer resolves the issues Magento merchants face on a daily basis. This layer basically serves as the engine behind their storefront, actively running and managing subscription cycles.

A subscription management engine boosts your business productivity. It does this by automatically handling recurring billing logic, orchestrating payments, and managing your subscriptions, adjusting them as needed.

For example, if a customer wishes to replace their existing subscription plan with a lower-tier plan, these are the actions that this engine will take for a smooth transition process:

• Registers the customer’s request
• Checks the amount of the plan currently in use by the customer, the number of days left in the current cycle, and the amount of the new plan
• Calculates the customer’s payable amount based on these factors
• Generates an invoice for this customer with their adjusted bill
• Sends this invoice to the customer automatically with a payment link embedded in it
• Alternatively, it could automatically deduct this new charge from the customer’s account and then send them their invoice

And that’s just one example of smart automation in action. By automating most of their tasks through a subscription management platform, retailers can expand their operations and serve more buyers.

SubscriptionFlow Delivers the Missing Link

Having a subscription management layer is great, but how exactly do Magento retailers bring it to their stores? SubscriptionFlow resolves this problem by integrating with Magento. The integration of these two platforms means that your subscription data is fed directly into SubscriptionFlow from Magento, and then your subscriptions are managed inside SubscriptionFlow.

This ensures that there are no two, disconnected systems working separately, and no manual data transfers from one platform to another. Rather, SubscriptionFlow and Magento do the data sharing themselves, and work on the same pace.

The end result of the integration is that your customers subscribe through your Magento store, and then get managed inside SubscriptionFlow. SubscriptionFlow triggers payment processing for recurring payments, creates and assigns invoices to customers, updates customer database and takes care of any plan changes that arise.

Merchants can see each and every subscription activity and billing event inside SubscriptionFlow. They have access to reporting dashboards that show them every update in real-time so they can easily catch up with their business activity.

Key Subscription Automation Features for Magento Retailers

The integration of Magento with SubscriptionFlow brings unmatched benefits to the retailers:

Automated recurring billing

This is the primary feature that every subscription merchant needs, and can’t operate without. SubscriptionFlow makes billing automatic, meaning all the payment schedules are tracked and acted upon automatically. Retailers don’t have to keep an eye on schedules manually, and this alone reduces half of their admin burden.

When any billing date arrives, the system triggers the chosen payment gateway to process payment, and once payment is processed, the subscription gets renewed itself.

Payment failure management

Payment issues are resolved without interrupting active subscriptions. SubscriptionFlow gives you the automatic payment retry feature so that you can automatically re-attempt charges if they fail for the first time. You can flexibly set the retry duration and frequency, and make the collection of failed payments faster.

Flexible product plans

Magento retailers can offer a variety of subscription plans. That can be tiers, subscription bundles, custom plans or other plan types. Offering a variety of plans doesn’t increase subscription management complexity since each and every plan is managed automatically, according to its own unique rules.

Customer portal

Your customers cannot only put requests for subscription changes, now they can initiate changes themselves too. With SubscriptionFlow, you can give each customer their own self-service portal through which they can handle their plan settings themselves. For instance, they can pause their plan, update card information, and change billing address.

Are you also a Magento retailer struggling with subscription management? Partner with SubscriptionFlow to sell, manage and grow subscriptions with ease.