The use of a subscription-based sales model has steadily become the norm within multiple industries, with the subscriptions industry growing by more than 100% a year over the past five years, delivering $2.6B in sales in 2016, up from $57M in 2011, according to a study by McKinsey).
Traditionally subscriptions were used in industries such as publishing for a monthly magazine subscription. This transaction usually required the purchase of the full subscription in advance. Now, as buyers have more choice and flexibility than ever before, they’re able to pay per delivery of the product or service and most times can cancel the subscription anytime.
Meaning of recurring billing process
Recurring billing is the payment side of subscriptions. Compared to a traditional bill you’d have to pay every month physically, recurring billing is a pre-approved charge that is automatically deducted, saving time and peace of mind for the customer.
Everything from Spotify to your gym membership uses recurring billing; in a software context for instance, the writing tool Ulysses allows users to sign up for a yearly or monthly billed subscription with the payment being taken from the customer at an agreed-upon time.
There are even more unusual ideas which have emerged in the subscription market because recurring billing has empowered an increasing number of product niches with the flexibility of subscriptions to consume new things in different ways like weekly meal prep ingredients, monthly treats for your dog, you can even get blood tests as a subscription!
Recurring billing management and solutions by Dozypay
Many companies offer subscription solutions; the priority features to look for are that it allows vendors to update customers’ payment information, manage discounts offered and oversee pricing changes made during the billing cycle. The subscriptions should also be able to be completed across multiple payment methods.
The payment infrastructure that makes all of this work is the real secret sauce, the back-end of subscriptions as a step-by-step process involves these steps:
- Purchase of the subscription by the customer
- Handling of the subscription request by the business’s web application
- A request by the web server of the purchase information concerning the pricing and the discount of the subscription
- Processing of the billing information by the subscription solution
- Creation of a secure card transaction by the payment gateway
- Authorization of the sale of the subscription by the merchant account, this finalizes the payment
Dozypay makes secure subscriptions possible for high risk merchant accounts with secure payments for epayments. Dozypay has a team of professionals that handle the process well enough and observe the security measures available. For more information please visit www.dozypay.com