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Payment Gateways Get Exciting: More Countries, ACH, Card Account Updater, $50K

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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 are making a push to regain that ground. For instance, they announced their “Ignition” program last week whereby certain 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.
  • 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.


Featured Customer: Timely, charging up the growth curve!

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In this post we take a look at one of our customers in the SaaS space who is charging up the growth curve.

Timely (gettimely.com) provides cloud-based scheduling software to small businesses who need to run an appointment book - like clinics, salons, and trainers.

The company is based in New Zealand, but with customers in 35 countries in little over a year, global expansion is inevitable. In fact, they’ve just opened an office in London.



Timely’s CEO, Ryan Baker (@ryanbakernz), tells the story of how they use Chargify…

We started using Chargify back in 2012. We loved how nicely the Chargify pricing scaled and that really supported us through the early stages of our growth. The team at Chargify has been great to work with, often scrambling to tweak small things for us in Chargify and always responsive to emails and tweets.

We pride ourselves on having awesome customer service for our Timely users, so we love having suppliers who share that approach.

Using the Chargify API (and the handy .NET wrapper), we have built a seamless integration with our scheduling app. Our customers see everything within the familiar look and feel of the Timely app, while in the background Chargify is doing all the heavy lifting for our billing and invoicing. We have a fairly traditional SaaS charging model, with multiple pricing plans and monthly recurring payments. Chargify eats this up. On top of this, we also use one-off charges in Chargify for our customers to pre-purchase SMS credits.

The last big piece of Chargify that we use extensively is coupon codes. Because Chargify makes this so easy for us to do, we are regularly running fun promotions for our customers to get goodies when they sign up to Timely. Everyone loves that stuff.

Prior to starting Timely, we built another booking system for the tourism industry which had a billing system all built into it from the ground up. When we started Timely, we looked at doing that again, but it just didn’t stack up vs using Chargify.

Chargify allowed us to focus on building a great scheduling tool for our customers to run their business.

For more information on Timely visit gettimely.com

Featured Chargify Customer: Cora, the Most Natural Recurring Service

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In this post, we take a look at one of our customers that ships products and helps women & girls around the world.

Cora (corawomen.com) is a subscription box providing organic feminine hygiene products to women, while helping girls in developing countries.

For every monthly box shipped to a woman in the USA, Cora provides a month’s supply of sustainable sanitary pads to a girl in a developing country who would otherwise miss days of school each month during her period.

Cora gives women a convenient way to receive safer, healthier alternatives to conventional feminine hygiene products, which are contaminated by pesticide residues and toxic chemicals from the manufacturing process (which have been linked to serious health problems).

Choosing the Recurring Revenue Model

Cora’s Founder and CEO, Molly Hayward (@Molly_Hayward), is a social impact entrepreneur, world traveler, and women’s rights advocate. She spent the last 8 years traveling to countries around the world, studying and working for women’s rights and socio-economic empowerment in various capacities.

When Molly saw women in her own country using products that are hazardous to their health, and girls in developing countries being at a disadvantage because they had no way to manage their periods, she wanted to find a way to solve the problem on both sides.

“I planned first to create a new line of organic products with a buy-one-give-one model, but the barriers to entry are extremely high in the industry, so I pivoted to to a subscription model, allowing women to create a custom product selection from an existing organic brand. This model made sense given the schedule of need for the products, but the path to setting up the company was less clear.”

Finding the Best System to Manage the Business

Molly recalls how she approached setting up the business, “I wanted to begin shipping and testing Cora’s product and service quickly - bringing on beta users and iterating right away, even before we had an outward-facing online presence. But I didn’t want the UI to be sloppy or disjointed - I wanted a recurring billing service that could stand alone, but then be integrated into a robust platform when we were ready to build out our web presence. I also wanted something that I could administer myself until I could bring on a technical team member.”

As a first time founder of a subscription shipment company, Molly searched for the right billing platform and was introduced to Chargify.

Recalling her early days, she goes on to say, “The subscription box space was blowing up, but it was still relatively early, so there weren’t a ton of layman’s “how-to’s” for setting up the technical side of things. I met the CTO of a successful weekly food delivery service and he told me unequivocally, Chargify.

It was more of an investment than some of the other services, but it was well worth it for the ease of use, customization options, and personal service. When I needed technical help, my emails were answered in a matter of minutes, instead of the usual day or two. And the Chargify team is always beyond helpful, making backend tweaks that have made our service, and our customers’ experiences, more seamless.”

Looking to the Future

Molly says Cora has spent the last year refining its product and service through beta testing, and traveling the world building partnerships in Kenya and India. The company is launching to the public with an inspiring video and crowdfunding campaign this month, raising capital for its new interactive platform and building its subscriber base.

“What started as a simple belief that gender equality in education is paramount to poverty eradication has evolved into a women’s health company and a movement to support girls’ education and empower women everywhere,” says Molly. “We’re grateful to have a partner like Chargify that couples an incredible product with genuine connection to its customers. We couldn’t ask for more.”

More Info
Cora Crowdfunding Campaign
corawomen.com
@corawomen

Want Chargify to bill All Customers on the 5th?

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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:

• Manually: Using functions in our app, you can update one or many subscriptions to bill on a given date.

• With software: If you never want to do anything manually, you can automate the following 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 add another option, where you won’t need this workaround at all.

For now, this is the workaround, either manually or with your own short program:


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(if you like doing 1 subscription at a time)

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

And then 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).


STEP 2(if you’d rather do many subscriptions at once)

Use our new (as of May 2014) filter/update functions to find all of the subscriptions that need to be set to bill on the 5th of next month, and update the billing date on all of them in one step.

This screenshot shows where this process starts, on the Subscriptions tab:

If you’d like to see more depth on these functions, read this Blog Post about the ability to change the billing date, product, and product version on many subscriptions at one time.


YOU’RE DONE

The subscription(s) will remain in the trial period until the date you just set, then 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, especially with the new functions to update many subscriptions in one step.

And if you want to fully automate this, you can write a small program that uses our webhooks and API to do so.

Bulk Operations Save You Time

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With 1,300 businesses running on Chargify, there are many things that developers and business owners would like us to add to make their lives easier.

One of these things is Bulk Operations - the ability to change something on many subscriptions at the same time.

In the day-to-day course of business, these kinds of things can save a lot of time for you and your coworkers.


Change Billing Date or Product on Many Subscriptions

When you go to your Subscriptions tab, you’ll see some new things:

• Checkboxes next to each subscription
• Filters for Period End, Product, Status, and Next Billing Date
• Buttons to change Billing Date or Product

(see the main graphic for this blog post, above)

These functions allow you to select a subset of subscriptions and then change the billing date or product on all off them.

For instance, you can select the subscriptions where the billing period ends sometime next week AND they’re on the “Gold” product AND their status is “active”... AND then individually remove a couple of subscriptions because you know something about them specifically, and then apply a billing date change to all remaining subscriptions in the group.

This is going to save a lot of time for Chargify merchants!

It will really be useful for businesses that bill all customers on the same day of the month. Also very useful for business that ship real goods, where they need to adjust billing/shipping dates for whole groups of subscribers as they prepare shipments.

[UPDATE as of May 24 late in the day:  I learned after writing this that this function ONLY applies to subscriptions shown on the screen in the filtered list (ie, 25 subs). This will be expanded in the coming days. For now, you have to run the process multiple times to work on more than 25 subscriptions at a time. This limitation will be removed soon.]

Perhaps less common, but I’m sure very useful when you do need it, is the function in the image above: selecting a group of subscriptions and then moving them all from your “Silver” product to your “Gold” product. I know there are business reasons that give rise to this, and now it’s really easy to select 73 people on one product and move them all to another product.


Change Product Version on One or Many Subscriptions

Sometimes, you need to change the product version of one or more subscriptions.

Changes to a product do not affect older subscriptions already on the product, because we automatically create new product versions anytime you change something about a product. Over time, you can easily end up with 5 or 10 versions of the same product, and you may have customers subscribed to each version.

This works well for most business needs, but there are times when you want old customers on newer product versions.

For instance, maybe you just changed the price of your product and you want the existing 215 customers to pay the new price on their next bill. Until we released this new function, you had to change each one manually, OR you could write an API script to do it.

Now, you can easily change the product version:

• On a single subscription
• On all subscriptions currently on version ‘x’

To change the product version on a single subscription, go to the Subscription Summary page. You’ll see the items highlighted in red, below:

To change the product version on all subscriptions on a specific older version to the latest version, go to the Setup tab and then to the product in question. We placed it here because this usually comes up when you make a new version of an existing product:

We hope you’ll enjoy these new time-saving features!

New Payment Gateway / Card Processor Options

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When we can’t satisfy a new or existing merchant because we lack support for the payment gateway or card/transaction processor they need, that’s a real shame, because we may have everything else they need, but that last piece is missing.

New Gateways

To alleviate this problem, here are 4 new gateways that work with Chargify:

Elavon’s“VirtualMerchant” payment gateway connects directly into Elavon. They provide payment gateway and merchant account / card processing in one package. Elavon is generally preferred by medium/large companies that want really low transaction costs.
Works for merchants here: USA
Charge your customers in: USD, CAD
Customers must be here: Anywhere

First Data’s“Global Gateway e4” provides connectivity directly into First Data. They provide payment gateway and merchant account / card processing in one package. First Data processes the single largest share of credit card transactions in the USA, and is preferred by many large companies that have high transaction volumes and want really low transaction costs.
Works for merchants here: USA
Charge your customers in: USD, CAD
Customers must be here: Anywhere

IN BETA: CyberSource is one of the payment gateways popular with mid-sized and larger businesses in the USA. They are owned by Visa and they themselves own Authorize.Net, another popular payment gateway. We just released this today (June 11th, 2014), so it’s in “beta” status.
Works for merchants here: USA
Charge your customers in: USD, CAD, AUD
Customers must be here: Anywhere

IN BETA: Pin Payments is really popular with Australian merchants, especially software developers. They offer instant approval for a payment gateway and merchant account all in one. Because we just released this today, we have the “beta” label on it and we’re looking for merchants happy to give it a try.
Works for merchants here: Australia
Charge your customers in: AUD, USD, NZD, SGD, EUR, GBP
Customers must be here: Anywhere

Customize and Design Your Emails

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For some time now merchants have been asking for more control over the emails that get sent to their customers. In the past couple of months we have been working very hard on doing just that. Today we’re happy to announce Custom Email Templates.

Custom Email templates provide the ability for you to control the look and feel of the email communications that get sent to your customers from Chargify. This opens up marketing and branding avenues that were not previously available.

To begin, we combined the email settings into a single pane on the settings page. Here you can configure which emails get sent and to whom they get sent. This page also acts as the jumping off point for configuring the content and design of emails.

Each email contains an ‘Edit Template’ button that launches our new email template editor. We call this the Composer.  Here you can define the from address, subject and body content of the email and see a live preview of what the email will look like.

The body content of the email, which now supports markdown, is wrapped in a Layout. A layout is a container that the body content gets added to. A typical layout might contain a logo and branding information at the top and helpful links and social media icons at the bottom. Layouts are reusable, so once defined they can be applied to other emails as well.

You can use composer now to edit all customer facing emails except for dunning emails. We plan on adding support for dunning emails in the near future. We hope you enjoy the addition of HTML emails as much as we do, it has been a delight to work on the feature.

Chargify + Braintree + PayPal = Pay with PayPal!

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Some of your customers want to pay with PayPal.

Now they can!

Braintree is one of the leading payment gateways that Chargify merchants use with Chargify. Braintree was acquired by PayPal last year, and they’ve been working on the newest, nicest checkout flow for customers to pay with PayPal.

We’ve been working with Braintree this year to make it a reality starting today - the first day that this new payment mechanism is available to anyone.

Chargify is the first commerce platform to make this available. It was an engineering stretch to meet the deadline, but we did!


What Your Customers See

If you have this new feature enabled (see steps in next section), here’s what your customers see on their Chargify-hosted signup page.

They choose credit card or PayPal:

And if they choose PayPal, they see this box to enter their PayPal account info:


Here’s what you’ll see when you look up your customer’s payment info in Chargify:


Requirements & Setup

(Note: Braintree is only making this available to US-based businesses at this time. Your customers can be located anywhere, of course.)

If you use Braintree as the payment gateway for your Chargify Site, your customers can now pay with a credit card or with their PayPal account. You just need to enable a couple of settings.

(If you do not use Braintree as your payment gateway, you can switch your Chargify Site to Braintree, but the process is difficult because moving card data from gateway to gateway is difficult. Instead, we suggest that you create another Site in your Chargify account, and connect it to Braintree. You can have as many Sites in your Chargify account as you want.)

Go into your Braintree account and enable/fill in this new setting…

(This should be present but with no options shown on Braintree Sandbox accounts, and it should be present as shown here on Braintree Real/Live accounts. If you do not see this in your Braintree account, please contact Braintree Support and request this on your account.)

Then go into your Chargify Site and enable this new PayPal setting:


In the Press

For more on this announcement, here it is in today’s press and on Braintree’s blog:
TechCrunch
VentureBeat
Braintree Blog


Summary

We know a number of merchants will be really happy about this, so we’re very excited to release it today.

We also know that there will be questions and probably some rough spots. This is all new - new at Braintree and new at Chargify - so let us know if you have any questions or comments.

 

 


Chargify and Shopify: Version 2

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A Good Thing Just Got Better

Two years ago, Shopify noticed that a number of merchants wanted support for recurring orders, so we worked with Shopify to provide a solution with Chargify.

It was a solid start, but Shopify/Chargify merchants really wanted to view one-time orders (from Shopify) and recurring orders (from Chargify) ALL IN SHOPIFY.

As of today, this is possible!

(Thank you to Shopify for expanding their programming API earlier this year to make this possible.)


Getting Started

To get started, log in to your Shopify store, click on “Apps” in the left hand menu, then click on the Chargify app under “Installed Apps”.

Once you’re in, click on the “Settings” link in the top right. You’ll be prompted to re-authorize Chargify, since we need access to Shopify’s new Orders API functionality.


You will be redirected to Shopify, and you’ll see something like the following:


Once you’ve re-authorized Chargify, you’ll be brought back to the Settings page, and a new option will appear:


If you enable the above option, then Chargify will turn each new signup and subscription renewal into a new Customer (if one does not already exist) and a new Order within your Shopify store. (If you do not enable this option, nothing will change and the app will function as before.)

You can check on the processing status of events between Chargify and your Shopify shop by clicking on the “Logs” link. Events that have successfully synced between Chargify and Shopify are noted as successful. Events that failed to sync because of an error in communication between Chargify and Shopify (internal server error, etc.) can be queued for reprocessing.

Note: Once we have passed a new order/renewal order to Shopify, we cannot cancel or delete it. If we send an order to Shopify and then someone cancels the subscription in Chargify, the order already in Shopify will remain there.


Shopify requires shipping information for valid Shopify “Orders” to be created.

Events that fail to sync because of incomplete data (customer didn’t provide shipping information, for example) cannot be re-processed by Chargify. They will simply be rejected by Shopify.

Because of this, it is highly recommended that you require shipping information on any Chargify products that you want to have pushed into Shopify when customers sign up for them or when normal subscription renewals occur.

You can do this by logging into your Chargify site, clicking on the “Setup” tab, and clicking “Edit” for any of the applicable products. Then, choose “Request Shipping Address at signup” and “Require Shipping Address at signup”:


This will ensure that Chargify has enough information from your customers to create acceptable Orders in Shopify.

Once you’re set up, you’ll notice new Orders are automatically created in your Shopify store as they are generated by Chargify:


Summary

This has been the Number One request from our Chargify/Shopify merchants, so we’re very excited to get this done!

If you have any questions or problems with this new functionality, please contact Chargify Support.

Chargify ACH/eCheck Support is Here!

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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…

Success is Methodical, but Guts can be Critical

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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.

Payment Gateways Get Exciting: More Countries, ACH, Card Account Updater, $50K

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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 are making a push to regain that ground. For instance, they announced their “Ignition” program last week whereby certain 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.
  • 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.

Salesforce + Chargify

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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.

 

Featured Customer: Timely, charging up the growth curve!

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In this post we take a look at one of our customers in the SaaS space who is charging up the growth curve.

Timely (gettimely.com) provides cloud-based scheduling software to small businesses who need to run an appointment book - like clinics, salons, and trainers.

The company is based in New Zealand, but with customers in 35 countries in little over a year, global expansion is inevitable. In fact, they’ve just opened an office in London.



Timely’s CEO, Ryan Baker (@ryanbakernz), tells the story of how they use Chargify…

We started using Chargify back in 2012. We loved how nicely the Chargify pricing scaled and that really supported us through the early stages of our growth. The team at Chargify has been great to work with, often scrambling to tweak small things for us in Chargify and always responsive to emails and tweets.

We pride ourselves on having awesome customer service for our Timely users, so we love having suppliers who share that approach.

Using the Chargify API (and the handy .NET wrapper), we have built a seamless integration with our scheduling app. Our customers see everything within the familiar look and feel of the Timely app, while in the background Chargify is doing all the heavy lifting for our billing and invoicing. We have a fairly traditional SaaS charging model, with multiple pricing plans and monthly recurring payments. Chargify eats this up. On top of this, we also use one-off charges in Chargify for our customers to pre-purchase SMS credits.

The last big piece of Chargify that we use extensively is coupon codes. Because Chargify makes this so easy for us to do, we are regularly running fun promotions for our customers to get goodies when they sign up to Timely. Everyone loves that stuff.

Prior to starting Timely, we built another booking system for the tourism industry which had a billing system all built into it from the ground up. When we started Timely, we looked at doing that again, but it just didn’t stack up vs using Chargify.

Chargify allowed us to focus on building a great scheduling tool for our customers to run their business.

For more information on Timely visit gettimely.com

Featured Chargify Customer: Cora, the Most Natural Recurring Service

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In this post, we take a look at one of our customers that ships products and helps women & girls around the world.

Cora (corawomen.com) is a subscription box providing organic feminine hygiene products to women, while helping girls in developing countries.

For every monthly box shipped to a woman in the USA, Cora provides a month’s supply of sustainable sanitary pads to a girl in a developing country who would otherwise miss days of school each month during her period.

Cora gives women a convenient way to receive safer, healthier alternatives to conventional feminine hygiene products, which are contaminated by pesticide residues and toxic chemicals from the manufacturing process (which have been linked to serious health problems).

Choosing the Recurring Revenue Model

Cora’s Founder and CEO, Molly Hayward (@Molly_Hayward), is a social impact entrepreneur, world traveler, and women’s rights advocate. She spent the last 8 years traveling to countries around the world, studying and working for women’s rights and socio-economic empowerment in various capacities.

When Molly saw women in her own country using products that are hazardous to their health, and girls in developing countries being at a disadvantage because they had no way to manage their periods, she wanted to find a way to solve the problem on both sides.

“I planned first to create a new line of organic products with a buy-one-give-one model, but the barriers to entry are extremely high in the industry, so I pivoted to to a subscription model, allowing women to create a custom product selection from an existing organic brand. This model made sense given the schedule of need for the products, but the path to setting up the company was less clear.”

Finding the Best System to Manage the Business

Molly recalls how she approached setting up the business, “I wanted to begin shipping and testing Cora’s product and service quickly - bringing on beta users and iterating right away, even before we had an outward-facing online presence. But I didn’t want the UI to be sloppy or disjointed - I wanted a recurring billing service that could stand alone, but then be integrated into a robust platform when we were ready to build out our web presence. I also wanted something that I could administer myself until I could bring on a technical team member.”

As a first time founder of a subscription shipment company, Molly searched for the right billing platform and was introduced to Chargify.

Recalling her early days, she goes on to say, “The subscription box space was blowing up, but it was still relatively early, so there weren’t a ton of layman’s “how-to’s” for setting up the technical side of things. I met the CTO of a successful weekly food delivery service and he told me unequivocally, Chargify.

It was more of an investment than some of the other services, but it was well worth it for the ease of use, customization options, and personal service. When I needed technical help, my emails were answered in a matter of minutes, instead of the usual day or two. And the Chargify team is always beyond helpful, making backend tweaks that have made our service, and our customers’ experiences, more seamless.”

Looking to the Future

Molly says Cora has spent the last year refining its product and service through beta testing, and traveling the world building partnerships in Kenya and India. The company is launching to the public with an inspiring video and crowdfunding campaign this month, raising capital for its new interactive platform and building its subscriber base.

“What started as a simple belief that gender equality in education is paramount to poverty eradication has evolved into a women’s health company and a movement to support girls’ education and empower women everywhere,” says Molly. “We’re grateful to have a partner like Chargify that couples an incredible product with genuine connection to its customers. We couldn’t ask for more.”

More Info
Cora Crowdfunding Campaign
corawomen.com
@corawomen


Bulk Operations Save You Time

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With 1,300 businesses running on Chargify, there are many things that developers and business owners would like us to add to make their lives easier.

One of these things is Bulk Operations - the ability to change something on many subscriptions at the same time.

In the day-to-day course of business, these kinds of things can save a lot of time for you and your coworkers.


Change Billing Date or Product on Many Subscriptions

When you go to your Subscriptions tab, you’ll see some new things:

• Checkboxes next to each subscription
• Filters for Period End, Product, Status, and Next Billing Date
• Buttons to change Billing Date or Product

(see the main graphic for this blog post, above)

These functions allow you to select a subset of subscriptions and then change the billing date or product on all off them.

For instance, you can select the subscriptions where the billing period ends sometime next week AND they’re on the “Gold” product AND their status is “active”... AND then individually remove a couple of subscriptions because you know something about them specifically, and then apply a billing date change to all remaining subscriptions in the group.

This is going to save a lot of time for Chargify merchants!

It will really be useful for businesses that bill all customers on the same day of the month. Also very useful for business that ship real goods, where they need to adjust billing/shipping dates for whole groups of subscribers as they prepare shipments.

[UPDATE as of May 24 late in the day:  I learned after writing this that this function ONLY applies to subscriptions shown on the screen in the filtered list (ie, 25 subs). This will be expanded in the coming days. For now, you have to run the process multiple times to work on more than 25 subscriptions at a time. This limitation will be removed soon.]

Perhaps less common, but I’m sure very useful when you do need it, is the function in the image above: selecting a group of subscriptions and then moving them all from your “Silver” product to your “Gold” product. I know there are business reasons that give rise to this, and now it’s really easy to select 73 people on one product and move them all to another product.


Change Product Version on One or Many Subscriptions

Sometimes, you need to change the product version of one or more subscriptions.

Changes to a product do not affect older subscriptions already on the product, because we automatically create new product versions anytime you change something about a product. Over time, you can easily end up with 5 or 10 versions of the same product, and you may have customers subscribed to each version.

This works well for most business needs, but there are times when you want old customers on newer product versions.

For instance, maybe you just changed the price of your product and you want the existing 215 customers to pay the new price on their next bill. Until we released this new function, you had to change each one manually, OR you could write an API script to do it.

Now, you can easily change the product version:

• On a single subscription
• On all subscriptions currently on version ‘x’

To change the product version on a single subscription, go to the Subscription Summary page. You’ll see the items highlighted in red, below:

To change the product version on all subscriptions on a specific older version to the latest version, go to the Setup tab and then to the product in question. We placed it here because this usually comes up when you make a new version of an existing product:

We hope you’ll enjoy these new time-saving features!

New Payment Gateway / Card Processor Options

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When we can’t satisfy a new or existing merchant because we lack support for the payment gateway or card/transaction processor they need, that’s a real shame, because we may have everything else they need, but that last piece is missing.

New Gateways

To alleviate this problem, here are 4 new gateways that work with Chargify:

Elavon’s“VirtualMerchant” payment gateway connects directly into Elavon. They provide payment gateway and merchant account / card processing in one package. Elavon is generally preferred by medium/large companies that want really low transaction costs.
Works for merchants here: USA
Charge your customers in: USD, CAD
Customers must be here: Anywhere

First Data’s“Global Gateway e4” provides connectivity directly into First Data. They provide payment gateway and merchant account / card processing in one package. First Data processes the single largest share of credit card transactions in the USA, and is preferred by many large companies that have high transaction volumes and want really low transaction costs.
Works for merchants here: USA
Charge your customers in: USD, CAD
Customers must be here: Anywhere

IN BETA: CyberSource is one of the payment gateways popular with mid-sized and larger businesses in the USA. They are owned by Visa and they themselves own Authorize.Net, another popular payment gateway. We just released this today (June 11th, 2014), so it’s in “beta” status.
Works for merchants here: USA
Charge your customers in: USD, CAD, AUD
Customers must be here: Anywhere

IN BETA: Pin Payments is really popular with Australian merchants, especially software developers. They offer instant approval for a payment gateway and merchant account all in one. Because we just released this today, we have the “beta” label on it and we’re looking for merchants happy to give it a try.
Works for merchants here: Australia
Charge your customers in: AUD, USD, NZD, SGD, EUR, GBP
Customers must be here: Anywhere

Customize and Design Your Emails

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For some time now merchants have been asking for more control over the emails that get sent to their customers. In the past couple of months we have been working very hard on doing just that. Today we’re happy to announce Custom Email Templates.

Custom Email templates provide the ability for you to control the look and feel of the email communications that get sent to your customers from Chargify. This opens up marketing and branding avenues that were not previously available.

To begin, we combined the email settings into a single pane on the settings page. Here you can configure which emails get sent and to whom they get sent. This page also acts as the jumping off point for configuring the content and design of emails.

Each email contains an ‘Edit Template’ button that launches our new email template editor. We call this the Composer.  Here you can define the from address, subject and body content of the email and see a live preview of what the email will look like.

The body content of the email, which now supports markdown, is wrapped in a Layout. A layout is a container that the body content gets added to. A typical layout might contain a logo and branding information at the top and helpful links and social media icons at the bottom. Layouts are reusable, so once defined they can be applied to other emails as well.

You can use composer now to edit all customer facing emails except for dunning emails. We plan on adding support for dunning emails in the near future. We hope you enjoy the addition of HTML emails as much as we do, it has been a delight to work on the feature.

Chargify + Braintree + PayPal = Pay with PayPal!

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Some of your customers want to pay with PayPal.

Now they can!

Braintree is one of the leading payment gateways that Chargify merchants use with Chargify. Braintree was acquired by PayPal last year, and they’ve been working on the newest, nicest checkout flow for customers to pay with PayPal.

We’ve been working with Braintree this year to make it a reality starting today - the first day that this new payment mechanism is available to anyone.

Chargify is the first commerce platform to make this available. It was an engineering stretch to meet the deadline, but we did!


What Your Customers See

If you have this new feature enabled (see steps in next section), here’s what your customers see on their Chargify-hosted signup page.

They choose credit card or PayPal:

And if they choose PayPal, they see this box to enter their PayPal account info:


Here’s what you’ll see when you look up your customer’s payment info in Chargify:


Requirements & Setup

(Note: Braintree is only making this available to US-based businesses at this time. Your customers can be located anywhere, of course.)

If you use Braintree as the payment gateway for your Chargify Site, your customers can now pay with a credit card or with their PayPal account. You just need to enable a couple of settings.

(If you do not use Braintree as your payment gateway, you can switch your Chargify Site to Braintree, but the process is difficult because moving card data from gateway to gateway is difficult. Instead, we suggest that you create another Site in your Chargify account, and connect it to Braintree. You can have as many Sites in your Chargify account as you want.)

Go into your Braintree account and enable/fill in this new setting…

(This should be present but with no options shown on Braintree Sandbox accounts, and it should be present as shown here on Braintree Real/Live accounts. If you do not see this in your Braintree account, please contact Braintree Support and request this on your account.)

Then go into your Chargify Site and enable this new PayPal setting:


In the Press

For more on this announcement, here it is in today’s press and on Braintree’s blog:
TechCrunch
VentureBeat
Braintree Blog


Summary

We know a number of merchants will be really happy about this, so we’re very excited to release it today.

We also know that there will be questions and probably some rough spots. This is all new - new at Braintree and new at Chargify - so let us know if you have any questions or comments.

 

 

Chargify and Shopify: Version 2

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A Good Thing Just Got Better

Two years ago, Shopify noticed that a number of merchants wanted support for recurring orders, so we worked with Shopify to provide a solution with Chargify.

It was a solid start, but Shopify/Chargify merchants really wanted to view one-time orders (from Shopify) and recurring orders (from Chargify) ALL IN SHOPIFY.

As of today, this is possible!

(Thank you to Shopify for expanding their programming API earlier this year to make this possible.)


Getting Started

To get started, log in to your Shopify store, click on “Apps” in the left hand menu, then click on the Chargify app under “Installed Apps”.

Once you’re in, click on the “Settings” link in the top right. You’ll be prompted to re-authorize Chargify, since we need access to Shopify’s new Orders API functionality.


You will be redirected to Shopify, and you’ll see something like the following:


Once you’ve re-authorized Chargify, you’ll be brought back to the Settings page, and a new option will appear:


If you enable the above option, then Chargify will turn each new signup and subscription renewal into a new Customer (if one does not already exist) and a new Order within your Shopify store. (If you do not enable this option, nothing will change and the app will function as before.)

You can check on the processing status of events between Chargify and your Shopify shop by clicking on the “Logs” link. Events that have successfully synced between Chargify and Shopify are noted as successful. Events that failed to sync because of an error in communication between Chargify and Shopify (internal server error, etc.) can be queued for reprocessing.

Note: Once we have passed a new order/renewal order to Shopify, we cannot cancel or delete it. If we send an order to Shopify and then someone cancels the subscription in Chargify, the order already in Shopify will remain there.


Shopify requires shipping information for valid Shopify “Orders” to be created.

Events that fail to sync because of incomplete data (customer didn’t provide shipping information, for example) cannot be re-processed by Chargify. They will simply be rejected by Shopify.

Because of this, it is highly recommended that you require shipping information on any Chargify products that you want to have pushed into Shopify when customers sign up for them or when normal subscription renewals occur.

You can do this by logging into your Chargify site, clicking on the “Setup” tab, and clicking “Edit” for any of the applicable products. Then, choose “Request Shipping Address at signup” and “Require Shipping Address at signup”:


This will ensure that Chargify has enough information from your customers to create acceptable Orders in Shopify.

Once you’re set up, you’ll notice new Orders are automatically created in your Shopify store as they are generated by Chargify:


Summary

This has been the Number One request from our Chargify/Shopify merchants, so we’re very excited to get this done!

If you have any questions or problems with this new functionality, please contact Chargify Support.

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