Enhance your revenue growth with subscriptions

What is a subscription business?

Subscription businesses provide online shoppers with a convenient, personalised and cost-effective way of buying products regularly. It’s a powerful business model that’s especially common within the ecommerce space to sustain growth and customer engagement. Building a subscription business helps convert occasional shoppers into loyal, potentially lifelong customers but also ensures a consistent recurring revenue stream. Many subscription models are characterised by recurring payments made by customers in exchange for your products or services. This could be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual payments. This financial stability allows your business to make precise growth projections and expand with confidence.

Define your subscription model

Your subscription offering should provide clear and compelling value to customers. What unique benefits or features will subscribers receive? Are you selling a product, service or membership? How often are you providing new features? And how often do you want to collect recurring payments for your offering? Do you have a tiered pricing structure? Create a unique plan that caters to different customer segments and sets your subscription apart from competitors and resonates with your target audience. Different subscription models to consider:

• Product subscriptions: Subscribers receive physical or digital products regularly, such as monthly subscription boxes. These often contain limited editions or surprise items that customers hope to try or collect.

• Service subscriptions: Subscribers gain access to ongoing services, like streaming platforms or software services. Very common with office programs for individuals and enterprises alike or leisure entertainment subscriptions and delivery services.

• Membership subscriptions: Subscribers become part of an exclusive club or community, with access to premium content or member-only perks. Membership subscriptions are often found with gyms or online learning platforms which unlock access to extra features.

• Add-on subscriptions: Customers get to choose whether to use the subscription service and use recurring payments or pay manually. This could be a hybrid solution if you want to implement both options for your business. 

Set up the technical infrastructure with a payment gateway

In order to fully benefit from recurring payments and regular automated payment processes, you need to have the right technical infrastructure in place that seamlessly integrates with your business. Handle recurring billing, automate invoicing and manage customer subscriptions with a payment gateway to streamline your subscription operations in one place. 

Set up a secure and reliable payment gateway to process subscription payments easily. There are many factors to consider in order to find the perfect payment gateway. Choose a payment gateway that complies with global security standards and protects you from fraud and unwanted access. It’s important to keep financial data and personal customer details protected through advanced security protocols. 

Ensure that your payment gateway integrates seamlessly with your website or ecommerce platform and provides a smooth payment experience for customers. SecurePay works with any website type and provides integration guides for you or your developers to follow. You can also integrate ecommerce extensions and take payments on your website in a PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant manner with the SecurePay API (Application Programming Interface). This allows for much better control over the easy-to-use user interface than is possible with other payment integrations. You can also customise the checkout experience to match your brand.

Before launching your subscription business, it’s worth testing that your offering works with the payment gateway. SecurePay has a “sandbox version” that allows you to test everything for free before signing up for a live account. This way you can gather feedback, make adjustments and ensure a smooth experience.

Support your customers and offer easy onboarding

Develop a user-friendly onboarding process to guide subscribers through signing up and using your product or service. Provide clear instructions to help subscribers get the most out of their subscription. Also seek feedback from subscribers to understand their experiences and pain points. Use simple reporting tools to analyse user behaviour, oversee transactions, set up reporting and collect valuable insights. Based on the data, make continuous improvements to your subscription offering. Enhance features and the user experience to keep subscribers engaged and satisfied.

Also provide your customers with a greater flexibility and offer a range of payment methods to pay for the subscription model. With recurring card payments you can set future payments for your customers, securely storing their personal financial data and using tokens to cover sensitive card details. Popular credit and debit cards include Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club and JCB. Accepting direct debit payments is another safe and easy option to make regular payments from your customers’ bank accounts.

Excellent customer support is essential for retaining subscribers and resolving any issues promptly. SecurePay also offers local support for any help with your tech set up or sales.

Scale your subscription business

As your subscription business matures, explore growth strategies such as expanding your subscriber base, introducing new subscription tiers, diversifying your offerings or entering new markets. When taking your business to the global stage and across international borders, it’s a huge advantage to accept foreign currency payments. With Dynamic Currency Conversion solutions, your customers can choose to pay in their cards issuing currency and avoid conversion costs. Your subscription pricing will appear in their preferred currency and the exchange rate will be locked in throughout the entire payment cycle. This way customers can make credit card payments in the currency of the card’s country of issue which seems more trustworthy and transparent. It’s a great strategy to improve abandoned checkouts, create certainty and expand your reach.

Launch your subscription business with SecurePay

Building your own subscription business holds many benefits and gives you the advantage of scalability, as revenue grows proportionally with the subscriber base. With SecurePay, you can create safe online payment experiences with a dynamic, flexible and secure payment gateway. A product of Australia Post, over 90,000 Australian businesses trust SecurePay and take everyday online payments to the next level.