UPDATE on Nov 5, 2013: New ways to get customer self-management URL:
The URL that each of your customers needs to manage his/her account appears in some new places:
* On Statements and Invoices we send to your customer
* Via an API call that you can make from your software, thus allowing you to provide it to your customer in your app.
Read more in the billing portal docs.

UPDATE on Aug 30, 2013: New Features
Due to merchant requests in the past few days, we have added 4 new options for your Billing Portal functionality.
You can now allow/disallow your customers doing these things:
* Change Plan
* Cancel Plan
* Update Card
* Update User Profile

ORIGINAL POST on Aug 27, 2013:

We love building tools that simplify subscription business management, freeing our merchants to focus on what makes their businesses unique and amazing.  Many of you are doing just that - building awesome services and tools desired and relied upon by an impressive number of subscribers.  So far in August alone, our merchants have added over 68,000 new live subscriptions and billed over $8.2 Million USD.  That’s awesome!

Not surprisingly, our most-requested feature is something described simply as a “Portal”: a place where your subscribers can manage their Chargify-powered subscriptions without you having to write even 1 line of code or sign up for any new services.

Today, we’re making that vision a reality with the launch of the Billing Portal at BillingPortal.com.

What is the Billing Portal?

Billing Portal is a tool that makes it easy for your customers to directly manage their subscriptions.  Once you enable Billing Portal for a customer, they will instantly be able to perform a variety of subscription management duties:

View subscription details

Whether a customer has one or many subscriptions with you, we provide the at-a-glance info they need. This view includes next billing date, trial status, current credit card on file, billing address, shipping address, and more.

Change plans (Upgrade/Downgrade)

Customers can easily preview their upgrade and downgrade options, then finalize the change with one more click.

Add or update their credit card on file

Cancel accounts

As much as it hurts to see customers leave, its important to make it an easy and painless process once it is inevitable.  We’ve got your back there.

View Statements and Invoices

We’ve redesigned statements and they are beautiful and easy-to-follow in the Portal!  In addition, your subscribers can easily download PDFs of their statements and invoices.

Enabling Portal

The Billing Portal can be turned on under the Settings tab of Chargify.  You can choose whether you want new customers to be automatically invited (via email), or whether you’d like to manually invite your subscribers.  There are some customization options you’ll want to consider, such as the ability to upload a logo that displays to your subscribers in the Portal.

You can manage your invited subscribers from the “Billing Portal” sub-tab of the Subscriptions tab.  From here, you can send and revoke invitations.  You can even bulk-invite subscribers when you are ready to make Portal available for all.

Authentication

A guiding principle for our design of Billing Portal authentication is that your subscribers shouldn’t have to create (or remember!) yet another password.  If your service is password-protected, we recognize that having a separate password for just the “billing part” might cause confusion.

So, we’ve taken a different approach - there are no passwords.  Access is controlled via short-lived links (URLs) sent to your subscribers via email.  As long as they have quick access to their email accounts (and who doesn’t, these days?) they’ll be able to quickly access and log in to Portal.  Once logged in, we try to make it easy for them to remain authenticated in a seamless way.  If you enable statements-via-email in Chargify (which is an existing feature many of you use), those statements will now include a “management link” that will quickly whisk the subscriber away to the Billing Portal, where they can dig into the details or make changes.  As long as we “know” this subscriber and the device they are using, clicking the management link will appear like a seamless transition.  If they are new or don’t have a session on their current device, they’ll be able to easily request a login link to be sent to their email, which works a lot like the well-known “forgotten password” flow.

Available Today for All Merchants

We’re making Billing Portal available to all of our merchants on all of our plans.  In the future, we may offer advanced features of Portal, including white-labeling options, to our higher plans.

Billing Portal is brand new, and we’re excited for you to try it.  As always, we’ll continue to iterate on it.  We’d love your feedback during this process.

One interesting insight into the technical side of Billing Portal is that, other than a few configuration bits on the Chargify side, Portal has no special access, privilege, or magic.  It consumes our (upcoming) API Version 2 and uses Chargify Direct for all forms that handle sensitive cardholder data.  In the coming weeks, we’ll be fully documenting this new API so you can make use of its efficiency and new features.

This new feature lives at a different domain (billingportal.com), which gives us a lot of flexibility for how it’s used going forward.  Still, it is a Chargify feature though-and-through.  We hope you like it.

Disclaimer: the use of Mark Wahlberg’s name and image is not meant to imply endorsement.  You should still go watch some of his movies or listen to some of his music.

Once or twice a year, we gather our team somewhere beautiful for a week. Last week was in Breckenridge, Colorado.

The goal of these team trips is:

• To provide “together time” for everyone (we’re all remote workers in the USA),
• To improve various aspects of Chargify, with a focus on functionality.

Here are the first 4 items that the team got out - they went into production today:

1. Prorated Quantity & On/Off Components
(add & remove user/item/location licenses, let us worry about prorating & taxes)

2. Option to Remove Chargify Logo from Portal
(have a strong brand?... keep the Portal pages focused on it)

3. Easily Invite Customers to their Self-Service Portal
(another place where you can invite customers to their self-service Portal)

4. One-Time Charges: Accrue on Card Failure
(if you attempt an immediate one-time charge on a card and it fails, you can tell our system to just add it to your customer’s bill)

Here’s more detail on today’s new features…

1. Prorated Quantity & On/Off Components

More and more merchants are using our Quantity Components and On/Off Components to charge their customers for user licenses or “seat” licenses for things like:

• $25 per month per added feature
• $50 per month per user
• $100 per month per vehicle
• $2,500 per year per location

When the amount is small and the period is short, almost everyone is happy without prorating any amounts. For instance, if your customer adds or removes a user in the second bullet, most people don’t care about ~$25 during the first month.

But when the amounts get bigger, and especially when the periods get longer, people start to care about the money! Imagine in the last bullet, if the customer adds or removes a location in the 6th month, we’re talking about $1,250 that’s owed to someone.

Until now, our merchants had to figure out the prorated amount on their own and then do a manual debit or credit to their customer’s account. Some merchants have the technical skills to automate it, and they did so with API calls.

Oh, and what if some components were taxable? Then you’d have to figure out tax to collect or return, too. Uggh! That’s what you want Chargify to do, right?

Now it’s available to all merchants, with no work!

Here are your new options:

If your customer increases the number of units (and thus owes you money), you can set Chargify to do 1 of 3 things:

• No Prorate: We won’t calculate or charge anything. This is how components already work.
• Prorate & Charge Now: We calculate the prorated amount (with current tax rate, if the component is taxable) and charge the card on file immediately. If the charge is declined for some reason, then it will be added to your customer’s current statement/invoice and will be billed along with any other charges on their next bill.
• Prorate & Charge Later: We calculate the prorated amount (with tax, if applicable) and just add it to your customer’s current statement/invoice.

If your customer decreases the number of units (and thus is due money), you can set Chargify to do 1 of 2 things:

• No Prorate: We won’t calculate or credit anything. This is how components already work.
• Prorate & Give Credit: Calculate a credit (including tax, if applicable) and place it on your customer’s current statement/invoice. It’s money that your customer will redeem later, when it’s time to charge them for something.

Site Settings for Component Proration

Existing Chargify Sites will be set to ‘No Prorate’ in both cases, so that current behavior will not change for you unless you specifically turn it on.

The defaults for NEW Sites will be: ‘Prorate & Charge Later’ for unit increases and ‘No Prorate’ for decreases, as these seem to be what most merchants want.

Component proration defaults can be set in your Site Settings. Individual API calls can override the Site defaults.

2. Option to Remove Chargify Logo from Portal

A few merchants have asked if they can remove the Chargify logo from the new Self-Service Customer Portal that we rolled out last month. (Read the Portal blog post for Portal details.)

Starting on our $129 plan, we’ve added a Portal setting that allows you to remove our logo from the bottom of the Portal pages.

Your customers will of course still see the billingportal.com domain name in the URL, but they will see nothing of Chargify. Only your logo will appear anywhere.

3. Easily Invite Customers to their Self-Service Portal

After rolling out the Customer Self-Service Portal last month, a number of merchants asked for various improvements.

One request was to be able to invite your customers from the familiar Subscription information page that you already use a lot. That’s been added!

4. One-Time Charges: Accrue on Card Failure

As part of our work on prorated components, we had to tackle the issue of, “What to do if the merchant chose ‘charge immediately’ for an increase in components but the card gets declined?”

We added structure to smoothly handle this case, by adding a failed one-time charge to your customer’s open statement, presumably to be billed later.

We went ahead and added this new functionality to the existing one-time charge functionality on a subscription.

This, and More

These features will make various groups happy. And we have more things coming soon!

This week’s earlier blog post talked about our team’s time in Breckenridge, Colorado, and the work done by our dev team. There were 4 new features in that earlier blog post (headlined by prorated license billing).

Here’s new feature #5, which will help a lot of merchants…

Custom Fields on Hosted Signup Pages

There are many cases where you need to ask your customer for a little bit more info when they sign up. We’ve heard of merchants needing shirt size, shoe size, server parameters, sports league or team name, alma mater, color preference, and many others.

In most cases, you don’t have the time, the programming experience, or the desire to make your own forms. You just need some extra text fields.

If you’re one of these merchants, your life just got easier!

Step 1: Define Custom Fields

Step 2: Collect Info from Customers

Step 3: Review Info

This is our 3rd Friday blog post about new functionality that all started with our team trip to Breckenridge, Colorado, last month.

Here are two more new features that will really appeal to various merchants:

1. Email before End-of-Trial, Email before Recurring Payment

• Merchants are finding that they convert more trial users to paying customers if they email those users a few days before the trial ends.

In the past, you had to set this up with a tool outside of Chargify. Now it’s built in.

• And just before every regular recurring payment, why not send an email reminder? This prevents your customers from being surprised, especially with long payment cycles where they can easily forget. You can also use this email to remind them of the usefulness of your service, to upsell related services, and to provide contact info if they have any questions. Of course, we know some merchants don’t want to remind their customers, but some very much do.

We love adding features like these, because we know it will help our merchants grow their businesses just a little bit faster!

Of course, both new emails are optional.

2. Limited-Use Coupons

Limited-use coupons allow you to set the number of times a coupon can be redeemed by new customers. The most common use is something like, “The first 25 signups who use coupon code XYZ will get $100 off!”

Until now, merchants did this with custom programming that used our API.

Now everyone can offer Limited-Use Coupons!

...

(If you missed these, check out the last two Friday posts about useful new things like Custom Fields on Signup Pages and Prorated License Billing.)

...

We just released 2 new features for your enjoyment: Two-Factor Authentication and Instant Webhook Testing.

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-Factor Authentication (also referred to as “2FA” to save brain cells & fingers) helps protect against the use of lost or compromised passwords, and it’s an emerging standard for increasing the security of sensitive applications (especially those in the financial industry).

How It Works

If Two-Factor Authentication is turned on, then your Chargify login will follow this path:

1. You’ll enter your normal username & password.

2. We will send a special code to your mobile phone.

3. You’ll enter that code into a field on the screen that shows up right after the login screen.

We have partnered with security provider Authy to add 2FA. The special codes are sent to your phone either as a text message, or via their very nice iOS and Android app (the Authy app is also compatible with Google Authenticator!).

Details & Screenshots

For deeper info and more screenshots, read our new forum entry: Two-Factor Authentication

Instant Webhook Testing

Have you ever needed to test your integration with Chargify webhooks, but you had to wait for the webhook to be generated by this or that event in Chargify?

Maybe you were waiting for a new signup (which you can do almost instantly, but it takes work), or maybe you were waiting for a renewal payment, which can take minutes or hours or days, depending on how you have things set up.

Wait no more.

Now you can press a button and we’ll send you whatever webhook you need in your testing. This will save a ton of time!

Check out this silent screencast that shows how this works. (It’s silent because silence is golden, and it’s so simple that no words are needed, anyway.)

Other Recent Releases

And if you missed any of these, check out the last 3 weekly blog posts about other useful new things:

• Custom Fields on Signup Pages
• Prorated User/Software License Billing
• Marketing Emails, Exclusive Coupons

We’ve been updating our coupon management system to fit the needs of merchants who use Groupon, LivingSocial, and similar services.

Here’s how it all works to help your business…

1. Exclusive Coupons

We recently released Exclusive Coupons (also called limited-use coupons). This means you can set the number of times a given coupon can be used by each customer. You can restrict the number of uses to 1 or 5 or 25 or whatever you want.

2. Coupon Sub-Codes

You can also upload a long list of sub-codes that have the same effect as their “parent” coupon code. This means you define a coupon once, but you can have have 1,000 unique codes that will each give the same benefit as the regular coupon code.

It’s not uncommon for a merchant to upload 1,000 or 5,000 sub-codes.

3. Tying it All Together

You set up a special offer through Groupon or LivingSocial, and they’ll produce all the unique codes you need for potential customers.

You upload that list of codes into Chargify as coupon sub-codes.

Hand out the sub-codes!

Chargify will make sure that each Groupon/LivingSocial unique code can only be used once (or whatever limit you want, but it’s usually once per code for these campaigns).

Done!

Other Recent Releases

And if you missed any of these, check out the last 4 blog posts about brand new things:

• Custom Fields on Signup Pages
• Prorated User/Software License Billing
• Marketing Emails, Exclusive Coupons
• Two-Factor Authentication, Instant Webhook Testing

As our merchants grow, and as we get interest from medium-sized and large organizations, we’ve been hearing that they need to limit what various users can see and do.

For instance, we spoke with a merchant this week that has 200 employees plus some outside contractors, such as a call center.

With any organization of that size (and even down to, say, 30 people), the managers of those organizations may need to limit what people can see and do.

Common Scenarios

• Within a large organization, Finance needs access to financial data but not product editing, Sales needs access to customer info but nothing else, Product Marketing needs access to products, coupons, and components, but nothing else.
• A company outsources sales to a call center, and they want the call center staff to see customer records but nothing else.
• A company has 4 business divisions, and each division is a Site in Chargify. Only certain employees should have access to each Site.
• For regulatory compliance reasons, certain staff members can only access your test Sites, while others can access your live Sites.
• A consulting firm has many clients, and some of those clients have Sites in the firm’s Chargify account. The consulting firm needs full access to their clients’ Sites, and they want to give Site-only access to staff members from each client.
• You have an outside firm that does consulting for you, and you want to give them narrow access to your Chargify account so they can do their work but not see or edit various things.

Available on our $459 and Higher Plans

The request for user access controls has almost always come from our $1,299 and higher merchants, as well as from some $459 merchants as they grow their organizations. Thus, we’ve added User Access Controls to the $459 and higher plans.

How It Works

The system implements 3 types of users, plus a selection of fine-grained access controls on the most common type of user.

Types of Users

Within your Chargify account, each user/employee/contractor is classified as one of the following types of users:

• Owner is the account owner (handles Chargify billing) and can see & do everything.
• Admin can create other user and admin accounts, and has full access to all Sites.
• Team Member is limited to certain Sites, can only do what his/her permissions allow, and cannot create other user accounts.

(The first 2 user types have always been available on all Chargify accounts, and they still are.)

Access Controls per Team Member

Since the Owner and Admin users have full and nearly full access to everything, the real control you have is with your Team Member users.

The most basic thing you can do is allow or deny them access to whole Sites in your Chargify account:

• If you deny someone access to a Site, then they won’t even know it exists. This is perfect in situations where you have different businesses and different people for each one, or where regulations like HIPAA or PCI dictate that certain people not have any access at all.
• If you give someone view access to a Site, then they can view some parts of the Site, but their access will be limited to just viewing those things (they can’t create or edit).

If the user needs access to the Site and needs to do deeper things, here’s what you can give them:

• Manages product catalog adds the ability to create & edit products, taxes, and components.
• Views and exports financial metrics adds the ability to see Analytics, Transactions, CSV exports, and metrics on the Site dashboard.
• Manages subscribers and customers adds the ability to create, edit, cancel, and re-activate subscriptions and customers.

Summary

This implementation of User Access Controls will help a lot of medium-sized and large organziations, but there’s a good chance there will be more depth to add as we get feedback in 2013 and 2014. Let us know how it fits your organization.

And as much as we’ve worked on this over the past 3 weeks, we know that there’s probably a bug or two. If you find anything amiss, please let know. We fixed a small bug this morning that was preventing one of the CSV exports from working properly with certain user access settings.

Other Recent Releases

And if you missed any of these, check out the last 4 blog posts about other new functionality at Chargify:

• Custom Fields on Signup Pages
• Prorated User/Software License Billing
• Marketing Emails, Exclusive Coupons
• Two-Factor Authentication, Instant Webhook Testing

We haven’t done a blog post in a little while about the many small things that Santa’s Helpers are always busy developing in Santa’s Workshop at Chargify.

Lots of little things are always being added, and they usually appear on our Changelog.

Here are all 11 new things that have been quietly added to Chargify over 6 weeks from Halloween until now.

Entries shown with a small Christmas Tree will probably interest the greatest number of merchants.

[December 5]
• New ‘refund_success’ and ‘refund_failure’ events / webhooks.
more info

[December 2]
• Your customers can now update their On/Off and Quantity Component allocations in the the Customer Self-Service Portal.

• Define your own name/term for Statements and Invoices.
If your business, market, or country needs Statements and Invoices be called something else, you can define the term on the Settings page under the ‘Statements’ and ‘Invoice Billing’ tabs.

[November 25]
• Dynamic fields / variables from our email templates were added to Statement and Invoice memo fields.
Now you can add all sorts of personal/account-specific info to each of your customers’ statements and invoices.

[November 18]
• Greatly expanded list of dynamic fields / variables available in the body of these emails: signup, receipt, dunning, and expiration.
more info

[November 12]
• We improved the way the Chargify Direct signups endpoint handles the redirect URI.
more info

[November 7]
• Per-product settings for “end of trial” and “upcoming renewal” emails.
Select exactly which products generate these emails.

[November 5]
• Added “customer_organization” to Transactions CSV file export.
• Individual customer Self-Service Portal link now available via API and admin control panel.
more infohereandhere
• Added “product_price_in_cents” and “product_version_number” to Subscription API.
more info

[October 28]
• Per-product settings for coupon field.
Select exactly which products show the coupon field on their respective Hosted Signup Page.

...

And here are 5 other recent popular blog posts:
• Custom Fields on Signup Pages
• Prorated Software License Billing
• Team Member Access Controls
• 2-Factor Authentication & Instant Webhook Testing
• Marketing Emails & Limited-Use Coupons

...

YOU ARE GROWING

We handled $193 million in charges for merchants in 2013, and our support team answered their 16,000th written ticket last week.

The number of merchants using Chargify is growing, and the activity generated by those merchants is growing.

It’s all good - and it requires that we grow our team.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Chargify runs in 3 data centers right now, and we plan to run in 3 more. To support this, we’re hiring an operations engineer to work alongside Drew (our systems architect).

• If you know a good candidate for the job, please point them to our Job Ad.

And many thanks to @DHH for tweeting about it last Friday:

SUPPORT

If you’ve been using Chargify for long, you probably know Jay in our Level 1 support team. He was a CPA and high-level bank manager earlier in life, and he brings a lot of experience that really helps our merchants.

• Jay just transitioned from part-time to full-time, and he’s overseeing all of Support.

And if you came through our sales team anytime in the past 6 months, you may have interacted with Brit. He’s helped countless new merchants understand how our app meets their needs.

• Brit just transitioned from part-time to full-time, and he’s training with our existing Level 2 tech support team so he can help merchants both in Sales and Support.

WHAT YOU RELY ON

These are some of the hidden things we do to keep you happy.

Our software development team is always working on new functionality, large and small, and that functionality tends to be the most visible.

But the systems we run on, and the people helping you when you need support, are things you really need when you need them.

The whole team forms the complete picture of what you rely on for your business. We’ll keep growing if you keep growing

The normal behavior of Chargify is to start the billing cycle on the day your customer signs up. This matches what most merchants want.

But some merchants want to bill all of their customers on the same day of each month (for instance, on the 1st or the 5th or the 15th).

IT’S PRETTY EASY

Many merchants use the following workaround. It’s actually not much work.

STEP 1

Define your product with a trial period.

If you already have a trial period, great! Go to Step 2.

If not, add a trial period of at least 1 day, with a trial fee of $0.

Why are we doing this?

Well, because we want to delay Chargify from billing your customer. Without a trial period, we will bill your customer right when they sign up.

The trial period slows things down and gives you time to perform the next steps. You can set the trial to 1 day, or to 10 days or 30 days or whatever you’re comfortable with. 1 day is simply the minimum.

STEP 2

After a new customer signups up, find their new subscription.

STEP 3

Change the Next Billing Date on the new subscription.

It will currently be set to the end of the trial / start of billing, presumably 1 day from now.

Change it to the next available 5th day of the month (or whatever day you want), which may be this month or next month (depending of course on what day today is).

YOU’RE DONE!

The subscription will remain in the trial period until the date you just set, then it will bill and cycle as set in the product settings (for instance, if you set up your product to bill every 1 month, then it will keep billing on the 5th of every month).

BONUS STEP 4 (optional)

If you want to charge your customer a prorated fee for the time between now and the 5th, you’ll need to compute that fee yourself and then process a one-time-charge on the customer’s subscription.

You can select an immediate charge to their card on file, OR you can tell the system to just add the charge to their next regular bill.

SUMMARY

This may seem a little complex, but once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll see that it’s actually pretty easy.

And if you have many customers signing up every day, you can automate the entire process by receiving a Chargify Signup Webhook and then making an API call to modify the next-billing-date on the new subscription.

ClickDesk helps companies stay in touch with visitors to their website - using live chat, voice, and video.

When an existing customer visits your website and starts a chat, wouldn’t it be nice to know a lot about that customer?... like what plan they’re on, how much they spend, etc.?

Your sales and support people can look this up in Chargify, of course, but what if that data were available right in the chat software?

ClickDesk was getting requests for this, and they’ve done it!

If you’re using ClickDesk and Chargify to run your business, check out more details in the ClickDesk Blog Entry about this - they go into more depth.

Thanks, ClickDesk, for doing this - it’s a great idea!

Many merchants have been pressing us to add “ACH” or “eCheck” payments in the USA.

With ACH payments, your customer pays you directly from their bank account. No credit or debit card is involved.

Processing costs for ACH transactions are quite a bit lower than costs for credit card processing, and since our merchants tend to have moderate-to-high charges, this makes a noticeable difference to them.

Requirements for ACH Payments

Here are the basics you need to know to start using ACH with Chargify:

• You must be a US-based merchant, billing US-based customers

(Access to bank accounts is somewhat tied to countries. We hope to have a similar service in other countries in the future.)

• You must have a Chargify account on our $129/mo plan or higher

• You need a payment gateway that supports ACH transactions

The most popular gateway among our US merchants is Authorize.Net, and Authorize.Net is also one of the few that has had ACH in place for awhile. So the decision was easy: we chose Authorize.Net for our path to ACH.

• If you’re already using Chargify with Authorize.Net as your payment gateway, you need to get approved for ACH/eCheck processing through your Authorize.Net account.

• Fill out This eCheck Application and submit it to Authorize.Net.

Getting Your Business Approved

Authorize.Net will send your application to their underwriting department. Getting approved takes time. It took us 4 weeks to get approved.

Why does it take so long?

Because bank accounts are much more sensitive than credit cards. You’re taking money right out of someone’s checking or savings account.

So merchants who want to take money out of bank accounts have to be scrutinized pretty closely.

The impression we got while going through the process is that it’s going to be hard for very young companies to get approved, or at least they’re going to need a personal guarantee from one of the company owners.

Now in our 5th year, Chargify had to submit 3 years’ financials and taxes, substantiate our physical address, and of course show the precise web forms and language that we’ll be presenting to customers who are entering their bank info.

It Should Be a Bit Faster for You

You will still need to meet the business requirements stated above, but we’ve already gotten the pages, forms, and language approved that your customers will see. The underwriter will ask to see these pages, which have already passed the same underwriting group at Authorize.Net.

What we don’t know yet is where the line will be drawn between merchants that can get approved and those that simply cannot. We jumped through some hoops and we made it - we just had to work with the underwriter until they could show that we meet the banking requirements for ACH.

Chargify Site Settings

From this point forward in this blog post, we’ll assume that Authorize.Net approved you for ACH/eCheck processing.

1. In your Chargify Site Settings, make sure your Payment Gateway is set to Authorize.Net, and be sure that Authorize.Net has approved you for ACH/eCheck.

2. Also in your Chargify Site Settings, enable ACH as a payment option:

Allowing Customer ACH Payments

Once you have your Chargify Site set up for ACH payments, your customers can start paying you from their bank accounts. But how you get their bank info varies with how you sign them up and how well you know them.

ACH guidelines place the responsibility on you, the merchant, to reduce fraudulent or incorrect use of bank account info. It’s your duty to know your customer at least somewhat, to know who they are, and to gain enough trust in them to let them enter bank account info.

Merchants use 1 of 2 basic paths to get their customers into Chargify: Chargify-hosted pages/forms, or API calls (where you make your own signup forms).

ACH is handled differently with each path:

• Chargify Hosted Pages for Signup and Payment Updates: If you are using the Chargify-hosted pages for things like signing up customers and allowing them to update their payment info, then the customer flow works like this: 1) Customer signs up, 2) THEN gets approved by you for ACH, and 3) THEN gives their bank account info.

• Chargify API / Chargify Direct: If you are using your own forms and connecting to our API to sign up customers and update their payment info, then you can sign up new customers with bank info from the start. This is easier for you and for your customers, but it assumes you have a closer relationshiop with your customers and you trust them to enter their bank account info.

(Note that the hosted customer Portal does not yet support ACH, regardless of how customers got signed up in Chargify. We will come back to this as we get overall feedback re ACH and how merchants and their customers are using it.)

ACH Payment Flow with Chargify Hosted Pages

If you’re using Chargify Hosted Pages to get your customers signed up and to collect payment info from them, here’s what you’ll do to get them paying via ACH:

1. Your customer signs up for your product using the product’s hosted signup page. They will NOT be able to enter bank account info on that form. So you will need to have them sign up with a credit card OR sign up for a free product OR a paid product that has a free trial period. The point is to get them signed up without any payment info OR with a credit card, which they will later change to ACH.

2. Find the customer in Chargify and enable ACH Payments for them. You can search by customer or by subscription and then enable ACH for them:

3. Click the link to send the Update Payment Profile form to your customer. You’re basically inviting them to give their ACH bank info:

4. When your customer receives the email/form, they will enter their bank info on this form:

From that point forward, your customer will pay you via ACH. If there is ever any change to the recurring amount or timing, we will automatically send an email to your customer, telling them of the new arrangement. This is an ACH requirement.

ACH Payment Flow with API/Chargify Direct

If you’re using our API or Chargify Direct to get your customers signed up and to collect payment info from them, here’s what you’ll do to get them paying via ACH:

1. Your customer signs up for your product and enters bank info right then, OR they sign up and then later give you bank info on a separate payment update form (if you do that).  Either way, you can submit bank account info to Chargify when you create or update the customer record or payment profile record.

From that point forward, your customer will pay you via ACH. If there is ever any change to the recurring amount or timing, we will automatically send an email to your customer, telling them of the new arrangement.

As mentioned earlier, this is clearly a faster and easier process for you and for your customer, but it comes with the caveat that it’s your responsibility as the merchant to know your customer and to trust them with bank account info.

Bank Account Security vs Easy On-Boarding

You’ll notice that we did not make any system using our hosted pages that allows bank account info to be entered by a brand new customer on a public-facing signup form.

We decided that allowing bank account info to be entered by a brand new customer on a public signup form is too risky. You should not do that, either. Make sure that your user/customer flow is such that you build up some knowledge of your customer and some trust before accepting bank account info from them.

ACH Payment Flow with the Chargify Admin Panel

There is a third path of sorts: As with credit cards, you can enter ACH bank account info directly into your customer’s payment profile in the Chargify admin panel.

This assumes that you already have a customer in Chargify and you need to get their payment info offline, such as over the telephone, via fax, in person, etc.

While this is possible and can help in some special customer support circumstances, that’s all it’s meant for - special customer support circumstances.

Unless your organziation is PCI compliant itself, you are not supposed to handle payment info, especially in totally open, unencrypted form, so please do this sparingly or not at all. We know there are sometimes customers who refuse to work any other way.

Multiple Payment Profiles

As part of getting ACH done, we’ve introduced a much nicer way to allow your customers to have multiple Payment Profiles. This usually means multiple credit cards, but that’s not all.

Your customer can have credit cards AND bank account info on file. You or they will simply choose which profile is THE payment method being used.

Here’s an example:

Retries When ACH Payments Fail

ACH guidelines dictate tighter rules for retrying failed ACH payments (versus credit cards). So we created a separate dunning/retry system for ACH payments. You will set up a different retry schedule and emails for customers paying via ACH.

Note that the guidelines do not allow you to try more than 3 times, and after 3 failed attempts, we must forever stop trying to collect on that arrangement. Basically, if your customer cannot pay after 3 tries, you will no longer be able to try - you will need to go back to them and start over on that particular payment plan.

Here are your ACH Dunning/Retry Settings:

Emails when Anything Changes

ACH guidelines require you to notify your customer if there is any change to the recurring amount to be taken, or to the date that it will be taken. In other words, any change at all since you last notified them of what to expect.

We will automatically send an email to your customer on your behalf if you make any changes.

We also recommend that you turn on the Upcoming Renewal Email in your Site Settings. This is an email we can send (if turned on) to your customers, telling them how much they will be charged, a few days before they are charged.

The point is, bank regulations are all about making sure your customer knows what to expect before any money comes out of his or her account.

Summary

ACH has been a big request for a long time. We’ve done a ton of work in many parts of our app to add ACH, and we know there will be more as we get feedback and refine this.

But we’re really excited to get this out! It should really alleviate some pain that a lot of our merchants have been feeling in their businesses.

If you need anything, please call us at (800) 401-2414 or send email to support@chargify.com

Thank You!

Thank you for your continuing business, which allows us to keep growing a profitable company and deliver more and more of what you need!

More to come…

YOU ARE GROWING

We handled $193 million in charges for merchants in 2013, and our support team answered their 16,000th written ticket last week.

The number of merchants using Chargify is growing, and the activity generated by those merchants is growing.

It’s all good - and it requires that we grow our team:

SUPPORT

• We’re hiring another Level 2 tech support person. If you know anyone good, here’s the Support Job Ad

• If you’ve been using Chargify for long, you probably know Jay in our Level 1 support team. He was a CPA and high-level bank manager earlier in life, and he brings a lot of experience that really helps our merchants. Jay transitioned from part-time to full-time in January, and he’s overseeing all of Support.

• And if you came through our sales team anytime in the past 6 months, you may have interacted with Brit. He’s helped countless new merchants understand how our app meets their needs. Brit also transitioned from part-time to full-time, and he’s training with our support team so he can help merchants more broadly.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

• Soon, we will publish a job ad for 2 new Ruby on Rails developers to join our U.S. team. We’ll Tweet and put the word out when that job ad is ready.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Chargify runs in 3 data centers right now, and we plan to run in 3 more. To support this, we’re hiring an operations engineer to work alongside Drew (our systems architect).

Many thanks to @DHH for tweeting about it. That probably helped us fill the opening pretty quickly.

WHAT YOU RELY ON

Our software development team is always working on new functionality and that functionality tends to be the most visible.

But the systems we run on, and the people helping you when you need support, form the complete picture of what you rely on for your business.

Let us know if you know any great people who’d like to join our team.

Many merchants have been pressing us to add “ACH” or “eCheck” payments in the USA.

With ACH payments, your customer pays you directly from their bank account.

Fees for ACH transactions are less expensive than for any other form of payment:

• You will pay 2-3% for credit card processing, and that’s for “qualified” transactions… certain card types (business credit cards, American Express, etc.) can push the cost up to literally 4%, depending on who you use for card processing.

• ACH transactions through Authorize.Net cost you just 1% and get less expensive as your volume increases.

The average Chargify merchant pays $438/mo for credit card processing. With ACH, they’d pay $146/mo.

Requirements for ACH Payments

Here are the basics to start using ACH with Chargify:

• You must be a US-based merchant, billing US-based customers

(Access to bank accounts is somewhat tied to countries. We hope to have a similar service in other countries in the future.)

• You must have a Chargify account on our $129/mo plan or higher

• You need a payment gateway that supports ACH transactions

The most popular gateway among our US merchants is Authorize.Net, and Authorize.Net is also one of the few that has had ACH in place for awhile. So the decision was easy: We chose Authorize.Net for our path to ACH.

• If you’re already using Chargify with Authorize.Net as your payment gateway, you need to get approved for ACH/eCheck processing through your Authorize.Net account.

• Fill out this Authorize.Net eCheck Application and submit it to Authorize.Net.

Getting Your Business Approved

Authorize.Net will send your application to their underwriting department. Getting approved takes time.

It took us 4 weeks to get approved.

Why does it take so long?

Because bank accounts are much more sensitive than credit cards. You’re taking money right out of someone’s checking or savings account.

So merchants who want to take money out of bank accounts have to be scrutinized pretty closely.

The impression we got while going through the process is that it’s going to be hard for very young companies to get approved, or at least they’re going to need a personal guarantee from one of the company owners.

Now in our 5th year, Chargify had to submit 3 years’ financials and taxes, substantiate our physical address, and of course show the precise web forms and language that we’ll be presenting to customers who are entering their bank info.

It Should Be a Bit Faster for You

You will still need to meet the business requirements stated above, but we’ve already gotten the pages, forms, and language approved that your customers will see. The underwriter will ask to see these pages, which have already passed the same underwriting group at Authorize.Net.

What we don’t know yet is where the line will be drawn between merchants that can get approved and those that simply cannot. We jumped through some hoops and we made it - we just had to work with the underwriter until they could show that we meet the banking requirements for ACH.

Chargify Site Settings

From this point forward in this blog post, we’ll assume that Authorize.Net approved you for ACH/eCheck processing.

1. In your Chargify Site Settings, make sure your Payment Gateway is set to Authorize.Net, and that Authorize.Net has approved you for ACH/eCheck processing!

2. Also in your Chargify Site Settings, enable ACH as a payment option:

Allowing Customer ACH Payments

Once you have your Chargify Site set up for ACH payments, your customers can start paying you from their bank accounts. But how you get their bank info varies with how you sign them up and how well you know them.

ACH guidelines place the responsibility on you, the merchant, to reduce fraudulent or incorrect use of bank account info. It’s your duty to know your customer at least somewhat, to know who they are, and to gain enough trust in them to let them enter bank account info.

Merchants use 1 of 2 basic paths to get their customers into Chargify: Chargify-hosted pages/forms, or API calls (where you make your own signup forms).

ACH is handled differently with each path:

• Chargify Hosted Pages for Signup and Payment Updates
If you are using the Chargify-hosted pages for things like signing up customers and allowing them to update their payment info, then the customer flow works like this: 1) Customer signs up, 2) THEN gets approved by you for ACH, and 3) THEN gives their bank account info.

• Chargify API / Chargify Direct
If you are using your own forms and connecting to our API to sign up customers and update their payment info, then you can sign up new customers with bank info from the start. This is easier for you and for your customers, but it assumes you have a closer relationship with your customers and you trust them to enter their bank account info.

(Note that the hosted customer Portal does not yet support ACH, regardless of how customers got signed up in Chargify. We will come back to this as we get overall feedback re ACH and how merchants and their customers are using it.)

ACH Payment Flow with Chargify Hosted Pages

If you’re using Chargify Hosted Pages to get your customers signed up and to collect payment info from them, here’s what you’ll do to get them paying via ACH:

1. Your customer signs up for your product using the product’s hosted signup page. They will NOT be able to enter bank account info on that form. So you will need to have them sign up with a credit card OR sign up for a free product OR a paid product that has a free trial period. The point is to get them signed up without any payment info OR with a credit card, which they will later change to ACH.

2. Find your customer in Chargify. You can search by customer or by subscription.

3. Enable ACH for your customer. Here you can see two screenshots: one from the find-by-customer method, and one from the find-by-subscription method. They both work just fine; it’s really just your preference:

4. Send the Update Payment Profile form to your customer. You’re basically inviting them to give their ACH bank info:

5. Your customer receives the email/form and enters their bank account info here:

From that point forward, your customer will pay you via ACH. If there is ever any change to the recurring amount or timing, we will automatically send an email to your customer, telling them of the new arrangement. This is an ACH requirement.

ACH Payment Flow with API/Chargify Direct

If you’re using our API or Chargify Direct to get your customers signed up and to collect payment info from them, here’s what you’ll do to get them paying via ACH:

1. Your customer signs up for your product and enters bank info right then, OR they sign up and then later give you bank info on a separate payment update form (if you do that).  Either way, you can submit bank account info to Chargify when you create or update the customer record or payment profile record.

From that point forward, your customer will pay you via ACH. If there is ever any change to the recurring amount or timing, we will automatically send an email to your customer, telling them of the new arrangement.

As mentioned earlier, this is clearly a faster and easier process for you and for your customer, but it comes with the caveat that it’s your responsibility as the merchant to know your customer and to trust them with bank account info.

Bank Account Security vs Easy On-Boarding

You’ll notice that we did not make any system using our hosted pages that allows bank account info to be entered by a brand new customer on a public-facing signup form.

We decided that allowing bank account info to be entered by a brand new customer on a public signup form is too risky. You should not do that, either. Make sure that your user/customer flow is such that you build up some knowledge of your customer and some trust before accepting bank account info from them.

ACH Payment Flow with the Chargify Admin Panel

There is a third path of sorts: As with credit cards, you can enter ACH bank account info directly into your customer’s payment profile in the Chargify admin panel.

This assumes that you already have a customer in Chargify and you need to get their payment info offline, such as over the telephone, via fax, in person, etc.

While this is possible and can help in some special customer support circumstances, that’s all it’s meant for - special customer support circumstances.

Unless your organziation is PCI compliant itself, you are not supposed to handle payment info, especially in totally open, unencrypted form, so please do this sparingly or not at all. We know there are sometimes customers who refuse to work any other way.

Multiple Payment Profiles

As part of getting ACH done, we’ve introduced a much nicer way to allow your customers to have multiple Payment Profiles. This usually means multiple credit cards, but that’s not all.

Your customer can have credit cards AND bank account info on file. You or they will simply choose which profile is THE payment method being used.

Here’s an example:

Retries When ACH Payments Fail

ACH guidelines dictate tighter rules for retrying failed ACH payments (versus credit cards). So we created a separate dunning/retry system for ACH payments. You will set up a different retry schedule and emails for customers paying via ACH.

Note that the guidelines do not allow you to try more than 3 times, and after 3 failed attempts, we must forever stop trying to collect on that arrangement. Basically, if your customer cannot pay after 3 tries, you will no longer be able to try - you will need to go back to them and start over on that particular payment plan.

Here are your ACH Dunning/Retry Settings:

Emails when Anything Changes

ACH guidelines require you to notify your customer if there is any change to the recurring amount to be taken, or to the date that it will be taken. In other words, any change at all since you last notified them of what to expect.

We will automatically send an email to your customer on your behalf if you make any changes.

We also recommend that you turn on the Upcoming Renewal Email in your Site Settings. This is an email we can send (if turned on) to your customers, telling them how much they will be charged, a few days before they are charged.

The point is, bank regulations are all about making sure your customer knows what to expect before any money comes out of his or her account.

Summary

ACH has been a big request for a long time. We’ve done a ton of work in many parts of our app to add ACH, and we know there will be more as we get feedback and refine this.

But we’re really excited to get this out! It should really alleviate some pain that a lot of our merchants have been feeling in their businesses.

If you need anything, please call us at (800) 401-2414 or send email to support@chargify.com

Thank You!

Thank you for your continuing business, which allows us to keep growing a profitable company and deliver more and more of what you need!

More to come…

The development team here at Chargify has started to do “lunch and learns” every other Friday, using Google Hangouts. These sessions provide an opportunity for us to talk shop. As a completely remote development team, it’s important to intentionally schedule time to share knowledge in this way. Here are some of the things we talked about last Friday:

Editors
• vimcasts - a great resource if you want to level up in vim
• Sublime Text 2 For Ruby - tips on how to get the most out of Sublime Text when doing Ruby development
• Notational Velocity - for general note taking
• nvALT - a Notational Velocity fork
• Hackpad - another note taking app that is highly recommended; see also How To Use Hackpad

Development Tools
• marco-polo - appends the current environment (e.g. “prod” or “dev”) to a Rails console prompt
• jq - a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor
• API dock - for API documentation; see also https://github.com/voloko/railsapi.com
• Rubular - a Ruby regular expression editor
• Ruby Toolbox - helpful for researching gems and how well supported they are
• Ruby Weekly - newsletter that rounds up the latest informative blog posts in the Ruby world
• HTTPie - “a cURL-like tool for humans”
• Sidestep - automatically encrypts all of your Internet traffic when it detects you connecting to an unprotected wireless network

We also discussed how to think about using existing gems vs. writing your solution to a given problem.  One proposed rule of thumb was: “avoid gems that are functional model code that you can write. i.e. acts_as_state_machine, aasm, etc. Use the ideas but not the code. Instead, use gems that provide utilities that you leverage, like active_model_serializers.”

Look for more of these types of posts in the future.

The normal behavior of Chargify is to start the billing cycle on the day your customer signs up. This matches what most merchants want.

But some merchants want to bill all of their customers on the same day of each month (for instance, on the 1st or the 5th or the 15th).

IT’S RELATIVELY EASY

Many merchants use the following workaround. It’s actually not much work, but that really depends on how many signups you get per day:

• By hand: If your business has a relatively low number of signups each day, you can do this by hand.

• With software: If your business has a lot of signups each day, you can automate this whole process with a short program on your end. Set it up to listen for our Webhook for each new signup, and then to make the API calls to carry out the steps below.

In the future, we will make a 3rd option, where our system will take this from RELATIVELY easy to, well, VERY easy without any programming!

For now, this is the workaround, either manually or with your own short program using our webhooks and API:

STEP 1

Define your product with a trial period.

If you already have a trial period, great! Go to Step 2.

If not, add a trial period of at least 1 day, with a trial fee of $0.

Why are we doing this?

Well, because we want to delay Chargify from billing your customer. Without a trial period, we will bill your customer right when they sign up.

The trial period slows things down and gives you time to perform the next steps. You can set the trial to 1 day, or to 10 days or 30 days or whatever you’re comfortable with. 1 day is simply the minimum.

STEP 2

After a new customer signups up, find their new subscription.

STEP 3

Change the Next Billing Date on the new subscription.

It will currently be set to the end of the trial / start of billing, presumably 1 day from now.

Change it to the next available 5th day of the month (or whatever day you want), which may be this month or next month (depending of course on what day today is).

YOU’RE DONE!

The subscription will remain in the trial period until the date you just set, then it will bill and cycle as set in the product settings (for instance, if you set up your product to bill every 1 month, then it will keep billing on the 5th of every month).

BONUS STEP 4 (optional)

If you want to charge your customer a prorated fee for the time between now and the 5th, you’ll need to compute that fee yourself and then process a one-time-charge on the customer’s subscription.

You can select an immediate charge to their card on file, OR you can tell the system to just add the charge to their next regular bill.

SUMMARY

This may seem a little complex, but once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll see that it’s actually pretty easy.

And if you have many customers signing up every day, you can automate the entire process by receiving a Chargify Signup Webhook and then making an API call to modify the next-billing-date on the new subscription.

Last week, Chargify helped sponsor the Launch Festival in San Francisco. It’s an annual conference that was started in 2010 by Jason Calacanis. It brings together top-notch speakers like Mark Cuban and Paul Graham with hundreds of small companies & startups and thousands of attendees.

A funny thing happened that reminded me of the importance of occasional guts.  And of not jumping to conclusions.

The Story

Chargify had a booth with many other companies along a long, wide corridor.  Most were small companies, but right across from us was Amazon’s AWS, and behind us was Salesforce.

We knew that one the 3rd and final day of the conference, our sole outside investor, Mark Cuban, would be speaking in the afternoon. We thought it’d be nice to meet him, since we’d all be in the same large building.

But meeting someone like Mark can be difficult. It’s not because he’s a bad guy. He’s just very busy, and lots of people want his attention. Chargify is one of hundreds of investments that Mark has made over the years.

While Mark does (amazingly) reply to most of my emails, he does not take phone calls or meetings, at least not with small (to him) investments. When you’re a billionaire and you’re invested in hundreds of things, it makes sense. He told the audience that day that he can only answer about 1% of emails that come to him. It’s just a time issue.

Even though Mark invested in Chargify in 2011, we never met or even spoke on the phone. The relationship for 3 years was 100% email.

Mark Walked By

Mark arrived in the building a couple of hours before his stage time. Someone from conference management told us he was coming. “Be ready”, he said.

Well, when Mark walked down the corridor, he stopped a couple of times for media interviews, and eventually he walked past Chargify. He was talking with someone as he walked by our booth. I was standing there, wanting to get his attention but not wanting to be super rude.

I caught his eye, waved, and said something like, “Hey, Mark, Lance from Chargify” or maybe just, “Hey, Mark.”

He did the obligatory nod and “hey” that you do to someone you’ve never seen before.

But remember, he literally never had seen me before.

Sure, maybe the Chargify name should have jogged his memory (he’s been on many Chargify emails), but put yourself in his shoes: there are lots of people around, you’re passing sign after sign after sign, and it all blurs together.

The Wrong Conclusion

At the time, I jumped to the wrong conclusion: I assumed Mark recognized Chargify and chose to ignore us.

And having concluded that, I thought to myself, “I guess he’s a really busy guy and he’s invested in many things and Chargify is one of many. Well, kinda makes sense.”

I was at the booth with two other Chargify team members: Lee and Brit. I was disappointed, but it wasn’t a big deal and I figured I had just been naive.

Guts Turns it Around

It would have ended there, except that 26-year-old investment banker / M&A person, David Kram, stopped by the Chargify booth.

David is a typical M&A banker not long out of college: smart, aggressive, and willing to take some risks to get ahead.

David also seems to have a thing for meeting rich people and learning from them, and he was hoping to meet Mark Cuban. He came by our booth just a few minutes after Mark had walked past. He asked if I knew where Mark had gone.

(Yes, that’s David with Warren Buffet - I bet David just asked and Buffet said yes)

All I knew was the direction Mark walked.

I don’t remember the details, but we himmed and hawed briefly about going to find Mark. David clearly wanted to do so, just for fun. I kind of wanted to find Mark but also more or less assumed that Mark wasn’t very interested in meeting.

But guts won out. David and I went looking.

Searching for Mark Cuban

We walked down a long, wide corridor into relative darkness. We eventually saw a lone security guard at a sort of blockade: tables were placed to block an otherwise very wide corridor, leaving just a small opening, which is where the guard was stopping people.

We paused perhaps 50 feet before the guard, wondering for a second if it was worth continuing, since he appeared to be checking IDs or checking a list or something.

But we resumed our walk.

Badges?

My badge was back at the Chargify booth, and I’m not even sure it was a badge that would work, anyway. David had no badge (not an exhibitor badge, anyway).

I told the guard that I was a sponsor but I left my badge at our booth, and I was happy to go get it.

David did this crazy young bravado thing and yanked open his sport coat to reveal some random company t-shirt, and said, “This is my badge!” with a smile on his face. Who does that? I mean, it’s utterly meaningless! But it was funny.

With a bit of just being nice but pushy but humorous, we were allowed to pass. Perhaps the guard’s main duty was just to size us up and to conclude that we weren’t dangerous.

Free to Roam

Once the guard let us pass, we were basically free to roam a semi-secluded area. But no sign of Mark. All we saw ahead were bathrooms that appeared to be unused.

We walked on.

As we got to the bathrooms, there was an opening in the corridor wall, revealing a semi-private coffee break area.

“No Mark Cuban. Oh, wait,... there he is!”

Found Him!

A short line had formed of people getting pics with Mark. Maybe a half-dozen people. Another dozen were getting coffee and chatting.

We got in line for pics with Mark.

As our turn came up, I said something about being Lance from Chargify.

Mark lit up!

Now he made the connection, and he apologized for walking past us earlier. He said it just didn’t click at the time, but now it all came together.

David and I got pics with Mark.

Mark is Very Gracious

Here’s where it gets good…

I asked Mark if I could send back Brit and Lee from our booth. I knew they’d love to get pics with Mark Cuban.

Guess what?

He did even better and said, “Let’s go to the booth!”

It was great to get back to the booth and see Brit and Lee helping customers, then realizing David and I had come back with Mark.

We didn’t just find him - we brought him back!

Mark Cuban at the Chargify Booth

This was fun.

It was great to treat Brit and Lee, and it was of course fun to just have Mark Cuban hanging at our booth for 15 minutes.

I’ve never been around celebrities of any sort, so it was interesting to see what happens. People start gathering. People want pics. Press folks want interviews. A crowd forms relatively quickly.

It was also great fun for the whole Chargify team, even though most of them were working all around the USA. Within minutes, we had pics for the whole team to see in our online chat system, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.

The buzz and fun and exposure was quick and yet lasting.

The whole day got a couple of notches better, and I suspect our team got a nice little boost, too. Even customers thought it was neat upon seeing it on Twitter.

We got some good pics which live on now in tweets and on our website. Some potential customers care, and some existing customers care, too.

A lot of positive energy came out of that small event.

A Scary Reflection

A couple of hours later, I reflected on something: most of my life, I’ve been the guy who occasionally does risky things, especially if the risk is merely social and there’s some sort of reward.

In this case, I was going to let Mark just walk by. I assumed he recognized us and wasn’t interested in stopping. I wasn’t going to go hunting for him.

Thankfully, David showed up with youthful bravado!

The Lesson

So the lesson of this whole story, for you and for me, is this: don’t lose that youthful bravado, guts, naivate, or whatever you want to call it - at 46 (my age) or 26 or any age.

Real and lasting success is a methodical thing, NOT typically built on little, nearly random events like this.

BUT these little, nearly random events ARE sometimes the connectors or the “boosters” that make life interesting and lead to good things.

The story of how we got Mark Cuban to invest is a very similar story!

And that had a huge & lasting benefit to Chargify and to many lives.

Chargify works with 10 payment gateways in different countries.

The gateways used to be confined to their home countries, and they all used to do pretty much the same thing: store cards, process payments, and perform anti-fraud functions.

That’s all changing with expansion into more countries, plus some exciting feature differentiation that may help your Chargify businesses.

Gateways Expanding to More Countries

The large gateway companies are expanding beyond their original countries:

• Authorize.Net (based in the USA and owned by CyberSource/Visa) works with businesses in Canada and parts of Europe.
• Braintree (based in the USA and owned by PayPal) works with businesses in a long list of countries.
• Stripe (based in the USA) works with businesses in a growing list of countries.
• eWay (based in Australia) works with businesses in New Zealand and the UK.

Differentiation in Services

Perhaps more interesting, the gateways are differentiating with services, such as:

• Authorize.Net offers ACH/eCheck processing. (We added support for ACH payments last month - read more here.)
• Braintree introduced card Account Updater two weeks ago. This service keeps your customer cards “fresh” with no effort from you or your customer - if their card number changes or their expiration date rolls over, the system automatically updates the data. Braintree appears to be the first gateway to offer this widely. From what we can tell, it works for most/all cards (this was not the case for similar services in the past), and it’s free for all businesses using Braintree as their gateway.
• Stripe also has card Account Updater, but only for large accounts. We assume they will offer it more widely in the future.

Other Forms of Differentiaion

The gateways are also differentiating in other ways:

• Authorize.Net is the king of the hill in terms of US market share. Everyone knows Authorize.Net. Walk into your bank and ask to accept credit cards, and there’s a good chance they’ll sell you a package with Authorize.Net as the gateway. They are by far the leading gateway that businesses use with Chargify. Their setup time (for the merchant account portion) is usually a few days. For established businesses, this is no big deal, and may businesses that we run into already have a relationship with Authorize.Net.
• Braintree was, years ago, the favorite amoung software developers and startups. They seem to have lost that in recent years to Stripe, but after they got acquired by PayPal last year, they seem to be making a push to regain that ground. For instance, they announced their “Ignition” program last week whereby chosen startups don’t pay for their first $50K in normal processing fees. Braintree is also working to make the whole setup process quick: we sent a new customer to them yesterday, and the customer was processing live credit card charges thru Chargify + Braintree in about an hour.
• Stripe pioneered fast turnaround. You can sign up and start processing credit card transactions in a matter of hours, and the whole process is very smooth. They’re also very focused on software developers, having a great API and software libraries.

New Opportunities for Chargify Businesses

With the gateways all working on new offerings and pushing into new countries, it opens up interesting new opportunities for Chargify businesses:

• If you’re a US-based business, especially a B2B business, we recommend Authorize.Net, as they are used by most of our customers already, and they support credit card payments and ACH payments. Stripe is also a very good choice and it’s favored among our startup and developer customers.
• If your business can really benefit from the card Account Updater feature, we recommend Braintree. This feature is probably most helpful for B2C businesses that sell something non-critical, as customers may be less likely to respond to Chargify automated emails asking them to update their card details.

The nice thing is, you don’t have to choose just one.

Muliple Gateways in Chargify

You can operate any number of “Sites” in your Chargify account. There is no charge for this.

Each Site represents a “business in a box”, with its own products, customers, coupons, taxes, emails, etc.

And each Site is connected to its own payment gateway.

Traditionally, businesses running on Chargify have used different Sites and different gateways to support different currencies, but with the gateway changes above, Chargify businesses can also use Sites to match gateways to wider business needs.

For example, a business can have Chargify Sites set up like this:

• 2 Sites connected to Authorize.Net for credit card payments and ACH payments. Many businesses have existing arrangements with Authorize.Net that give them very attractive rates for high volume processing. And depending on what those businesses sell, their customers may be less likely to churn due to credit card changes alone.
• 1 Site connected to Braintree for credit card payments, to utilize their card Account Updater feature. Perhaps this Site is a B2C business where churn due to inaction by the customer to update their card is more likely.

Data Portability

We don’t store card data at Chargify. Instead, the data is stored in whatever gateway(s) you use with Chargify.

This brings up a caveat of the gateways: some will give your data back easily if you ever want it, and some will not.

• Authorize.Net will not easily give you your card data. We’ve heard that they charge ~$500 to port your data to another PCI-compliant entity (like Chargify or another gateway). This is not a big deal for medium/large businesses, but it can be difficult for a startup or small business.
• Braintree and Stripe will give your card data to you if you ask. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy, but it shouldn’t cost you anything.

We’ve helped a number of Chargify businesses get their data from one gateway and then place that data in another gateway. It takes some work, so we only do it on medium & large accounts.

Choosing Gateways

We encourage businesses to choose the right gateway(s) early for each business/Site in Chargify.

Most business owners don’t want to switch gateways once things are up and running. They usually have many other things to think about.

The typical reason is because the gateway doesn’t want them.

It’s not often, but it does happen: The gateway or underlying merchant account provider decides the business is too high a risk.

So be SURE you are honest with your gateway provider and merchant account provider about the kind of business you’re running.

Summary

The gateways are innovating in new and interesting ways.

We’re excited to see it.

It allows us to keep developing new functionality that helps you run your business and manage your customers through (hopefully) years of recurring billing and customer life cycle, while the gateways develop new features that make the whole picture richer for everyone.

See your Chargify customers and subscriptions in Salesforce.

Our Salesforce integration pushes Chargify customers & subscriptions into your Salesforce account, AND keeps that info updated as things change.

This means your team members who work in Salesforce can see the info they need to do better sales and better customer support.

Where

Here’s where data appears in Salesforce:

• A Customer in Chargify becomes an Account (with associated Contact) in Salesforce
• A Subscription in Chargify becomes a Note attached to the customer’s Account in Salesforce

When

Here’s when data gets pushed to Salesforce:

• New Subscription is created in Chargify
• Customer info is updated in Chargify
• Subscription info is updated in Chargify (renewal, product change, payment received, etc.)

When Not

And here’s when data does not get pushed to Salesforce:

• Customer/Subscription info created in Chargify while the integration is turned OFF
• New Customer is created in Chargify with NO subscription

Try It

We worked with a handful of Chargify merchants over the past couple of weeks regarding how data is mapped into Salesforce.

Please try it and let us know how it fits your Salesforce workflow.

Requirements

• For us to connect to your Salesforce account, it must allow access to the Salesforce API. This comes standard on Salesforce Enterprise plans. API access may also be added to other Salesforce plans for an extra fee.
• On the Chargify side, you must be on our $169/mo plan or higher.

See your Chargify customers and subscriptions in Salesforce.

Our Salesforce integration pushes Chargify customers & subscriptions into your Salesforce account, AND keeps that info updated as things change.

This means your team members who work in Salesforce can see the info they need to do better sales and better customer support.

Where

Here’s where data appears in Salesforce:

• A Customer in Chargify becomes an Account (with associated Contact) in Salesforce
• A Subscription in Chargify becomes a Note attached to the customer’s Account in Salesforce

When

Here’s when data gets pushed to Salesforce:

• New Subscription is created in Chargify
• Customer info is updated in Chargify
• Subscription info is updated in Chargify (renewal, product change, payment received, etc.)

When Not

And here’s when data does not get pushed to Salesforce:

• Customer/Subscription info created in Chargify while the integration is turned OFF
• New Customer is created in Chargify with NO subscription

Try It

We worked with a handful of Chargify merchants over the past couple of weeks regarding how data is mapped into Salesforce.

Please try it and let us know how it fits your Salesforce workflow.

Requirements

• For us to connect to your Salesforce account, it must allow access to the Salesforce API. This comes standard on Salesforce Enterprise plans. API access may also be added to other Salesforce plans for an extra fee.
• On the Chargify side, you must be on our $169/mo plan or higher.