How NMI Resellers Can Unlock New Revenue with Subscription Billing

For NMI resellers and ISOs, the primary way of making revenue is by onboarding more merchants and increasing transaction volume. They generate revenue one payment at a time. However, today merchant acquisition has become very expensive, market competition is cutthroat, and transaction volume is unpredictable. These factors have made revenue generation unsteady and less reliable for ISOs.

But there is still a way to stay ahead of competition and build steady revenue rails, and that is subscription billing. By offering subscription billing to their merchants, NMI resellers can increase their transaction processing volume naturally, and derive continuous revenue from their clients.

Let’s find out how exactly NMI resellers can tap into subscription billing and how this helps them unlock new revenue paths.

The Hidden Revenue Opportunity Inside Existing Merchant Portfolios

The idea that ISOs continuously need new merchants to scale profits is becoming outdated. There are many revenue opportunities that lie within your existing merchant base. You just need to tap into them efficiently.

Many merchants already need subscription billing

Subscriptions are dominating all the major industries today. Customers are becoming more used to recurring payments and prefer the convenience this model offers them. To keep up with this trend, merchants can’t afford to not have a recurring billing system. Without such a system, they have to experience various pain points.

They have recurring customers that purchase from them again and again. But they simply have no way to make them stay in an ongoing relationship, because they don’t support subscription billing. They use your NMI payment infrastructure for processing charges, but those charges are one-time.

Your clients deal with payments manually. They create checkout forms or payment links that their customers need to fill or click to pay manually. And they have to create invoices themselves as well. So payments are getting processed via NMI, but they need to be initiated manually.

Whenever payments fail, there is no recovery mechanism in place that can retry them. Lost payments become very hard to recover for merchants as their customers can become unresponsive.

Customer retention is poor because customers are now preferring automatic payments. Friction in billing can make your clients lose customers fast.

These cons exist where subscription billing doesn’t. Since your merchants already need a recurring payment solution, it makes sense for them to get it from you—the same provider handling their NMI payment processing.

Why this creates an opportunity for resellers

As an NMI reseller, you already control the merchant relationship. So you can easily extend subscription billing to them as a value-added service on top of payment processing.

Existing trust

Your merchants already trust your services. If you partner with a subscription billing platform to extend recurring revenue solutions to them, they can implement them through you with more confidence.

Existing payment infrastructure

If merchants use your NMI-powered payment infrastructure, they can access recurring billing as a layer on top of their existing setup. They won’t need to join all the pieces together from start since they will already have an enabled gateway and connected processor to process their recurring payments.

Easier upsell path for both resellers and their clients

With subscription billing, your business clients can keep their customers for longer periods and increase revenue per account. Consequently, they will need more payments to be processed regularly, meaning they will utilize your payment processing service more frequently as well. Plus, you will naturally upsell as merchants adopt subscription billing from you.

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

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subscription management software.

Why Subscription Billing Is the Perfect Upsell for NMI Resellers

Offering subscription billing can unlock many advantages for NMI resellers.

Increase revenue per merchant

If merchants adopt subscription billing through you, they generate extra revenue for you. This helps you expand account values. Resellers can offer this feature as a value-added add-on. Your core service remains NMI payment processing. Merchants offering subscriptions or memberships can upgrade their account by adding subscription billing.

Build stronger merchant retention

Merchants accessing subscription billing through you develop long-term operational dependency on your business as well. Their recurring billing and payment processing is tied closely together, making it harder for them to switch providers.

Create predictable monthly revenue

Traditionally, reseller revenue fluctuates because their merchants’ transaction volume is not consistent. But with subscription billing, forecastable income can be generated. NMI resellers and ISOs can charge monthly platform fees to merchants for using their subscription billing feature. This gives them a predictable cash flow.

Other than that, they get to have a share of their merchant’s ongoing transactions, as merchants use their payment processing service. Thirdly, resellers can provide additional services with subscription billing as monthly retainers. For instance, reporting and analytics tools.

What Happens When Resellers Don’t Offer Subscription Billing

NMI resellers that fail to offer subscription billing risk falling behind competitors who do.

Merchants start looking elsewhere

Merchants who need subscription billing will partner with third-party subscription management platforms. This would decrease their reliance on you, as they will get some of their most important needs fulfilled somewhere else.

This can also make their payment stack fragmented, as their payment processor and recurring billing tool won’t necessarily be on the same page. Merchants will easily be encouraged to look for other providers who offer more comprehensive services.

Competitors gain more control

When competitor platforms get into billing relationships with your business clients, they become an essential part of their payments ecosystem. They get to capture the recurring revenue that you could have owned by offering subscription billing first. This also increases merchant churn risk as they might eventually switch to the other platform completely.

The Smarter Strategy: Subscription Enablement as a Service

Modern resellers position themselves as enablers of subscription billing on top of merchants’ existing NMI setup. You can also follow this strategy to stay ahead of the curve. There are multiple services you can package and sell as a comprehensive subscription billing solution.

Subscription setup and onboarding

When we say subscription billing, we don’t just refer to a recurring payment switch. Resellers can package different subscription management and payment features together within their subscription billing service. One such service is merchant support with subscription setup so they can onboard more easily. Merchants need help setting up recurring billing so that their existing payment workflows aren’t disrupted.

Automated recurring billing

This is the core feature of subscription billing. Your merchants can automate charges to form more reliable payment channels.

Dunning and failed payment recovery

Dunning is the need of all merchants because payment failures are very common. Dunning and payment recovery tools help by recovering revenue from customer accounts automatically. Smart payment retries are an important feature example in this case.

Customer self-service portals

Merchants can simplify their subscription management with the help of self-service portals. These portals are given to their end customers using which they can control their plans themselves. So end customers don’t create support tickets for your merchant for every little change they need. They can make that plan change themselves.

Plan and pricing configuration

Merchants can continuously experiment with new prices and billing models, and formulate new product plans. They can play around with pricing tools to discover what helps them monetize best.

How Resellers Can Monetize Subscription Billing

There are many ways for NMI resellers to monetize their subscription billing offering.

Partner with existing subscription billing platform

First of all, it’s important to discuss how resellers can actually offer subscription billing as a feature. The best way for them to do that is by partnering with an already functional and reliable subscription billing software. That’s because it’s not easy to develop subscription billing capabilities from scratch. That is not only time-taking, but also very costly. The fastest route is to partner with existing solutions, such as SubscriptionFlow, that offer white-labelling options. You can use such software to sell their subscription payment features under your own brand.

Charge setup fees

Once you’ve acquired subscription billing capabilities, you can charge setup fees for them. Through this, you can generate initial onboarding revenue, and charge for implementation consulting as well.

Earn recurring platform revenue

Setup fees are one-time but recurring platform fees are forever. You can sell your subscription billing feature on a subscription basis. Your business clients pay monthly fees to access subscription management. Moreover, you can also earn through revenue sharing. Whenever your merchants process recurring transactions, you earn a percentage of the processing fees.

Bundle it into merchant packages

NMI resellers can bundle subscription billing into structured merchant packages, instead of selling it as a standalone feature. For example, they can package it together with payment processing, onboarding support and analytics. This way, merchants can build a more tightly integrated payment ecosystem, and derive more value from your business.

Why SubscriptionFlow Is Built for NMI Resellers

SubscriptionFlow enables NMI resellers and ISOs to offer subscription billing to their merchants effortlessly.

Native NMI compatibility

SubscriptionFlow already supports NMI, so resellers don’t need workarounds. They can continue using their current NMI payment infrastructure and offer subscription billing that works in harmony with NMI.

Automated subscription billing

Resellers can provide merchants with recurring payment capability without added manual effort. Your merchants can quickly set up billing cycles, renew subscription contracts automatically, process charges through NMI and create an invoice on each charge.

Smart payment retries

SubscriptionFlow also equips you with advanced payment recovery tools that you can extend to your clients. Your business clients can utilize automatic payment retry logic, card update notifications and billing reminders among other features.

Flexible recurring revenue models

You merchants can implement the subscription structures of their choice. Popular examples are usage-based billing model and tiered subscription plans. This makes your offering more versatile so you can accommodate merchants that work with different revenue models.

Merchant onboarding support

SubscriptionFlow helps your merchants adopt subscriptions better. They enjoy easy and guided setups and help with configurations so they can launch to market faster.

Multiple partner benefits

Partnering with SubscriptionFlow means that you can enable recurring billing without building infrastructure. You get to expand your existing merchant accounts faster and capture new recurring revenue streams.

Partner with SubscriptionFlow to expand your offering beyond payments. Offer elite subscription billing to the merchants you manage and turn them into a reliable source of recurring revenue.