SubscriptionBridge: frequently asked questions

Our mission: better, easier, more cost-effective subscription management

Why SubscriptionBridge?

Subscription-based business models sound really great until you actually need to deal with all of those subscriptions. That can be painful. Here's a quick example: if a recurring payment fails...

• who's going to follow up with the customer, repeatedly, until you get paid?
• how frequently should you follow up?
• should you turn the product/service off at some point?

That's the sort of thing that SubscriptionBridge can help with. For instance, you can schedule multiple, automated follow-up's when a recurring payment fails.

I can do this stuff myself. No?

Unless you automate some of the customer service tasks that come with managing a subscription, someone will have to personally get involved, which means a higher costs for you, and no benefit to the customer.

All right, can you give me a couple of examples?

Sure, here's 3 common scenarios

1. Customer wants to add a feature to a subscription (e.g. add additional storage to an online backup solution).
2. Customer wants to upgrade to a better subscription package (e.g. "Online Backup Pro", which has a bunch of features that "Online Backup Standard" doesn't have)
3. Customer's latest subscription payment failed.

SubscriptionBridge can take care of these tasks for you. For example, it does boring and somewhat complicated stuff like calculating pro-rated charges for the current billing period when there is a change in the subscription amount after a new feature has been added.

Don't recurring payment systems do this on their own?

Nope. They focus on the payment stuff (which is great and which is why we leverage them in SubscriptionBridge), not on the customer service side of things. See:

• SubscriptionBridge + PayPal recurring payments
• SubscriptionBridge + Authorize.Net ARB (automated recurring billing)

So, can you give me a complete list of payment gateways you support?

Sure, we support two recurring payment systems (they process the payments, SubscriptionBridge does the rest) and the new Early Impact Payment Gateway, which allows SubscriptionBridge to support more sophisticated subscription management features (SB does everything, from triggering recurring payments to handling usage-based billing).

• Compare the different payment systems
• Get the most out of SubscriptionBridge with the tightly integrated Early Impact Payment Gateway
• Are you already processing recurring payments with Authorize.Net ARB? Add SB and get the subscription management features missing from Authorize.Net ARB
• Are you using PayPal recurring payments? Use SB to turbo-charge PayPal with many additional recurring billing features

What exactly do I need to run a subscription-based business with SubscriptionBridge?

Here's a page that talks about everything you need. Keep in mind that to try SubscriptionBridge, you don't need an account with one of the supported payment gateways. There is a "fake" payment gateway built into the system exactly for that purpose. So you can start your free trial at any time.

I already have a subscription sign-up form. Can I keep it?

Yes, you can certainly keep it. In that case you won't use the built-in checkout, but rather will leverage the SubscriptionBridge API. Instead of submitting data to the payment gateway directly, the form will submit data to SubscriptionBridge. Ask your technical staff to review the subscription SubscriptionRequest call in the API.

I already have an account management area of my Web site. Can I use it?

It's entirely up to you. You can use the tools that are built into SubscriptionBridge, such as the built-in checkout (view demo) and built-in customer center) , for a speedy and inexpensive implementation. The only trade-off is that you have limited control on the user interfaces.

Or you can use the SubscriptionBridge API to have more control on where and how subscriptions are managed (e.g. where customers can update their payment profile). This requires some custom programming on your side to integrate the API, and it's therefore longer and more expensive to implement.

You can also use a combination of both approaches. For example, you could use the API to initiate the subscription (using your own subscription sign-up form instead of the built-in checkout) and the built-in Customer Center for subscription management. Note that there are some customer service tasks that are not currently available through the API and for which the Customer Center must be used.

Well, that all sounds pretty good: where do I go next?

Glad you like what you're hearing. Next steps:

• Here is how it works
• Take a look at some of the notification e-mails (It's a good way to visualize an immediate benefit of using SubscriptionBridge)
• See how much it costs
• Everything you need to use SubscriptionBridge
• Sign up and try it free of charge
  • No credit card required
  • Test everything with our test gateway
  • Setup multiple test businesses to mimic completely different scenarios
  • Manage live subscription and still pay nothing for up to 90 days or 100 active subscribers!