Subscription management and recurring billing features

Easily create and sell subscriptions

SubscriptionBridge contains lots of administration tools (the "Merchant Center") that make it quick and easy to create new subscription packages (subscription-based products and services), and manage existing subscriptions.

• Use the Subscription Package Wizard to get started in no time
• Set up one or more stores.
• Set up products, plans, and features.
• Combine them in all kinds of subscription packages.
• Easily assign optional features to multiple packages.
• Coming soon: full support for multiple languages.

Managing an existing subscription

• Easily locate a subscription by searching on a variety of filters (e.g. name, company, e-mail, etc.).
• Add or remove features to/from an existing subscription, and automatically notify the customer.
• Upgrade or downgrade, if related subscription packages exist.
• Create and apply one or more Custom Subscription Adjustments (e.g. a discount for a special customer)
• Automatically calculate a pro-rated balance (e.g. new features added, price is higher now), then notify the customer.
• Add one-time charges for products/services related to the subscription, but not affecting the recurring amount.
• Switch from trial to a full subscription before the trial end (e.g. trial is feature-limited and customer is ready to switch)
• Coming soon: integration with QuickBooks: recurring payments are automatically transferred to QuickBooks as sales receipts

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Branded, PCI-compliant, hosted checkout

SubscriptionBridge includes a ready-to-go, hosted shopping cart that allow you to immediately start selling any subscription packages you create in the SubscriptionBridge Merchant Center. The hosted checkout pages provide a secure, PCI-compliant environment.

• Branded with your logo
• Display of subscription name, description, terms & conditions, etc.
• Support for optional features
• Quick, one-page checkout
• Built-in integration with the payment gateway you selected in the Merchant Center
• PCI compliant: learn more about SubscriptionBridge and PCI compliance.
• See a live example

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Leverage the SB API within your own ecommerce system

By leveraging the SubscriptionBridge API, you can trigger the creation of a subscription profile from within your own application.

• Integrate SubscriptionBridge with a shopping cart
• Create a subscription from your own Free Trial signup page
• Initiate a subscription profile with or without a payment
• Easily display the subscription terms via the Subscription Terms Widget
• Learn more about the SubscriptionBridge API

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Ready-to-go, hosted, branded customer center

The SubscriptionBridge Customer Center is a hosted, readily available, branded customer service area for self-service subscription management. By allowing subscribers (your customers) to easily view and manage their subscriptions, SubscriptionBridge can help you dramatically lower customer service costs.

The system will help you eliminate tedious and time consuming tasks such as assisting customers with changing their payment method. It will also improve customer satisfaction as customers will be able to perform those tasks quickly, whenever they need to do so, without having to contact you.

Here are some of the tasks that your customers will be able to perform, on their own:

• View subscription summary (next payment, previous payments, other subscription activity)
• Stop trial (if any) and switch to a "full" subscription (e.g. feature-limited trial)
• Add available features (can be turned enabled/disabled in the Merchant Center)
• Upgrade or downgrade (can be enabled/disabled in the Merchant Center)
• Change payment method
• Pay an outstanding balance
• Cancel the subscription (can be enabled/disabled in the Merchant Center)

Advanced Users: build your own Customer Center

By leveraging the SubscriptionBridge API, there are many customer service tasks that can be performed from an external application.

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Automated and manual notifications

• Automatically send nicely formatted, HTML e-mail notifications (which include your logo).
• Add custom messages to most of the notifications.
• Specify when to follow-up after a failed payment (e.g. follow up 3 times).
• Manually notify a customer (e.g. to remind about an outstanding balance).
• Advanced users: specify a Callback URL and react to events from a custom application.
• Learn more >>

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Usage-based billing (metered charges)

Add usage-based fees to a subscription to support more flexible business models. Often called metered charges, they are typically based on one or more variables that you are monitoring and measuring to determine the charge (e.g. disk space or bandwidth used for a Web hosting account, mobile phone minutes or text messages sent, number of transactions processed, etc. etc.).

• Add usage-based fees manually through the SubscriptionBridge Merchant Center or dynamically through the API.
• Add multiple metered charges to the same subscription, for the same billing period (e.g. you are metering multiple variables, such as minutes and text messages on the same phone plan).
• Charges are totaled up and charged with the next subscriptio payment, and they are show separately on subscription statements

Feature Limitation: usage-based billing requires that the Early Impact Payment Gateway is used as the payment system. For technical reasons, at this point this feature is not compatible with PayPal Recurring Payments and Authorize.Net ARB.

Compare these payment systems.

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Multiple, independent businesses

• Run multiple businesses (e.g. 3 different, subscription-based Web sites)
• They are completely independent... (e.g. different notification settings, different subscription packages, different callback URL...)
• ... but managed in one location, under one account (save time and money!).

From the same SubscriptionBridge Merchant Center you can create multiple stores. Each store is a separate business, with separate products, subscriptions, reports, notification settings, etc.

For example, if you have two different online magazines, you can manage them as two separate businesses in SubscriptionBridge, at no extra cost (you are simply charged based on the total number of active subscribers. And your customers will be able to use a single account to manage subscriptions across different businesses.

The Store Setup Wizard makes it quick and easy to setup a new business in the SB Merchant Center.

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Pay for what you use: seemed pretty common-sense to us

Number of Subscribers	Your cost
Up to 100, first 90 days	FREE
Up to 100, after 90 days	$25/month
Up to 500	$0.25 per subscriber
Up to 2,500	$0.20 per subscriber
Up to 10,000	$0.15 per subscriber
Up to 50,000	$0.11 per subscriber
Over 50,000	Let's talk!

Unlike some providers that charge based on predetermined packages, SubscriptionBridge's common-sense pricing is based on a simple rule: you pay for what you use.

Among other advantages, this approach allows you to very easily account for the cost of using SubscriptionBridge in your business model.

• You pay based on the number of active, paid subscriptions managed through the system
• Free subscriptions (e.g. freemium model) are free
• If you have less than 100 active, paid subscriptions, there is a small $25/month fee after the first 90 days
• You can run multiple businesses through the same account (e.g. two separate "Wine Clubs").

Learn more about our clear, transparent, fair subscription management pricing.

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Shopping cart integrations

If you need to sell both subscription and non-subscription products or services, what you need is a subscription billing system that is integrated with a robust shopping cart program. This allows you to pick certain products and services in your ecommerce store catalog, "flag" them as subscriptions, and set up the subscription profile when an order is placed.

So we started integrating SubscriptionBridge with shopping carts that will allow you do so just that. At this time (October 2010), SubscriptionBridge supports:

• ProductCart, our PA-DSS validated, feature rich shopping cart software
  • About ProductCart
  • SubscriptionBridge integration documentation
• Magento, the popular open source ecommerce software
  • About Magento
  • SubscriptionBridge integration documentation
• More shopping carts will be added in the future

What does a shopping cart integration allow you to do? Here are the main features:

• Quickly connect your ecommerce store to SubscriptionBridge,
• Easily associate products/services in your store catalog to subscription "packages" created in the SubscriptionBridge Merchant Center
• Sell both one-time purchase items and subscription-based products/services
• Specify whether customers need to agree to product/service-specific "Terms & Conditions"
• Automatically setup a subscription profile when customers purchase a subscription

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Import subscriptions

Use the Import Subscription Wizard to load into SubscriptionBridge subscription profiles that already exist in one of our supported payment system (e.g. existing PayPal subscriptions or Authorize.Net ARB recurring payment profiles).

• Quickly import large amounts of recurring payment profiles
• Our staff will work with you to ensure a smooth transition into SubscriptionBridge.
• Contact us for more information.

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SubscriptionBridge API

Take advantage of many of the subscription management features built into SubscriptionBridge from a custom application. The SubscriptionBridge XML APIs are designed to help you:

• Creating Subscriptions
• Sending/Receiving Notifications
• Sending/Receiving Events
• Subscription Management

Visit the SubscriptionBridge WIKI for full API documentation.

Among the many useful features that are part of the SubscriptionBridge API is the Subscription Terms Widget: a small JavaScript widget that you can "drop" anywhere and shows the subscription billing terms.

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PCI compliance

Both the SubscriptionBridge system itself and our payment partners are PCI compliance applications, which reduces the scope of your PCI compliance efforts (e.g. you may be able to use the much easier, short-form self assessment questionnaire).

• Credit card information is never stored in SubscriptionBridge
• SubscriptionBridge is hosted in a secure, redundant hosting environmet at RackSpace, one of the world leaders in professional hosting services.
• SubscriptionBridge is a PCI-DSS validated application.
• The payment systems it uses are all PCI compliant.

More on SubscriptionBridge and PCI compliance.

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PayPal Recurring Payments

Are you using PayPal Website Payments Pro Recurring Payments? Are you missing features such as the ability to handle upgrades, more control on the dunning process (e.g. multiple notifications when a paymet is declined), or rich, HTML email notications?

SubscriptionBridge enhances the PayPal recurring payment engine, while helping reduce overall customer service costs. View a list of subscription management feaures that SubscriptionBridge adds to PayPal. Some of the tools include:

• Import existing recurring payment profiles using the Import Wizard (or our helpful staff)
• All payment information remains in PayPal
• PayPal remains the recurring payment engine
• SubscriptionBridge becomes the subscription management and customer service layer on top of PayPal recurring payments.

More on subscription management for PayPal recurring payments.

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Authorize.Net Automated Recurring Billing (ARB)

Are you using Authorize.Net Automated Recurring Billing for your recurring payments? Would you like more control on managing those subscriptions, from the emails that are sent to the handling of declined payments?

SubscriptionBridge gives you the ability to add smart subscription management features to Authorize.Net ARB, while helping reduce customer service costs.

• Use the Import Wizard (and our helpful staff) to import subscriptions into SubscriptionBridge
• All payment information remains in Authorize.Net
• Authorize.Net ARB remains the recurring payment engine
• SubscriptionBridge becomes the subscription management and customer service layer on top of Authorize.Net ARB

More on subscription management for Authorize.Net Automated Recurring Billing.

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Early Impact Payment Gateway

An advanced payment gateway brought to you in partnership with a leading payment service provide, and completely integrated with SubscriptionBridge.

• Leverages a Level 1 PCI compliant credit card vault
• No credit card information is ever stored by SubscriptionBridge
• Adds support for advanced features such as metered billing
• SubscriptionBridge acts as the recurring payment engine, for additional flexibility.

More on subscription management with the Early Impact Payment Gateway.

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