Avangate Commerce Solution Brings Valuable Help to Subscriptions and Billing

The idea of subscription selling is both old and new.

While subscriptions are hardly new in newspapers, magazines, or the like, subscription selling is also turning up in places it may not have been seen ordinarily, like clothing or even bathroom supplies.

That’s before the whole issue of the digital market comes into play, and that means solutions need to be put in place for subscription and billing across a variety of products. The Avangate Commerce Solution’s latest update, meanwhile, looks to go a long way toward getting increasingly digital consumers on track with subscription solutions.

The Avangate Commerce Solution’s Summer 2015 release offers up a slate of new tools in addition to many of the older ones already in place.

There are a set of active conversion tools designed to help drive users from “considering a purchase” to “actively making a purchase,” a desirable outcome for most businesses. There’s a complete marketing toolkit thrown in that includes testing scenarios with appropriate statistics, retention reporting mechanisms, and even templates designed to improve retention. There are even a set of revenue recovery tools to expand the available payment methods, optimize the overall flow of payments and even improve total global failover rates.

Services like these are in great demand; Avangate recently commissioned a survey in the United States which called attention to some key points.

95 percent of online shoppers, for example, are making recurring payments online, and 26 percent of consumers are spending at least a third of all disposable income on recurring online payments. 54 percent put online services to work daily, and around 78 percent of all adults in the United States are paying for some breed of online service, a number that’s up 50 percent from just last June. 15 percent are paying for more than five online services, up in a huge way from June 2014 where just two percent of respondents were.

However, one big point emerged, and that was that these numbers could actually be higher, if it weren’t for certain critical impediments. Reports suggest that the three biggest things keeping down the subscription concept are a lack of flexibility in payment options, the need to manually re-enter credit and debit card information, and the difficulty at checkout.

Subscription services are really on the rise; I hold a few subscriptions myself for things like Netflix and Xbox Live, so I understand the value of such things. I can even get behind subscriptions like shaving razors or clothes; such places will actually send on a new razor every so often, or a new shirt.

But what’s described in this report doesn’t seem to be much different from any standard shopping system; if you consider the items involved like commodities—the only difference between “twelve new shirts” and “a shirt a month every month for a year” is time—then most of the standard measures apply. Make it easy to shop and buy such things and suddenly you’ve got one impressive market afoot.

In the end, for those looking to offer subscription services, the key takeaway would seem to be a similar one for any online shopping option: the easier it is for people to buy what you’re selling, the more likely it will be that they will buy in the first place. So check into your processes, and see where you can lose a few steps to up the chances of making some sales.