ChargeBee

General usage

As the business world evolves from a mostly transactional model to a more relationship-driven one, the popularity of recurring revenue streams has risen among ecommerce and other digital applications. Financial services giant, UBS, expects the subscription economy to grow by 18% per year, doubling to $1.5 trillion by 2025.

This trend is driven by a variety of factors:

• The need for stable revenue streams and increased lifetime customer value among many startups
• Faster internet speed offered by 5G and fibre 
• Cheaper cloud-based IT infrastructure (e.g. SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS)
• Mobile shopping 
• Increased at-home consumption of entertainment, food delivery and technology services (Zoom anyone?)
• The rise of service marketplaces

The caveat is that incorrect implementation of a recurring revenue model can hurt your business. Application owners that want to make the switch should do it with the right technology.

Chargebee does a great job of simplifying the implementation and management of recurring billing. Some of its most valuable features include:

• Automated compliance management ( PCI DSS Level 1 certified)
• Support for free trials, promotions and coupons
• Support for flat fee or usage-based billing (tiered, volume or quantity-based)
• Upgrading / downgrading of subscriptions and pro-rata billing
• Support for over 100 currencies
• Automated global tax, invoice and refund management
• Integration with 30+ payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, WorldPay and PayPal
• Tracking of SaaS metrics
• Seamless integration with finance, marketing and sales applications like Xero, QuickBooks, Zendesk, Mailchimp and Salesforce
• Scalability – it can handle high volumes of subscribers
• Custom dunning logic: payment reminders, smart payment retries, reports

Popularity

Investopedia rated ChargeBee the best overall recurring billing software in 2021. It is the second most popular billing and subscription tool on Stackshare.

Marketplace benefits

ChargeBee’s fast and easy setup is ideal for marketplace startups that want to implement and test subscriptions as part of their revenue model. It can also make recurring billing, collection and promotions more efficient.

RangeMe is a B2B product discovery marketplace that connects suppliers with retailers like Target, Whole Foods and Sephora. They experienced high churn rates due to failed payments.They also struggled to implement discounts that could increase subscription conversions. ChargeBee’s dunning process helped them to reduce churn rates dramatically, while automated discount coupons brought in more than 2,000 new subscribers.

Deliverr uses third-party warehouse space as fulfillment centres for merchants on Shopify, eBay, Amazon and other marketplace platforms. Manual invoicing and payment reminders resulted in hundreds of thousands of unpaid subscriptions. They used Chargebee to automate billing and accounts receivable which reduced unpaid invoices by 80%.