5 Common Challenges of Subscriptions and Recurring Billing And Solutions to Overcome Them

Managing subscriptions is one of the most time-consuming and terrifying tasks for businesses. Subscriptions and recurring billing can be a great way to generate steady revenue for your business, but they also come with their own set of challenges. A subscription-based business requires you to manage a big client database, and billings and most importantly keep in mind the exact dates that you have to renew the plans, manage cancellations, ensure payment security, etc.  

According to Gartner, By 2023, 75% of organizations selling directly to consumers will offer subscription services, but only 20% will succeed in increasing customer retention. So, clearly subscription business is here to stay in 2023!  

So let's dive deep into the challenges that SaaS businesses operating under the subscription model face and its solutions.   

Here are a few of those challenges.  

1. Managing Customers  
2. Managing Billing frequency  
3. Failed transactions management  
4. Multi-Currency and Language Support  
5. Payment gateways support 

1. Managing Customers 

Subscription businesses tend to have a significant number of users at any one time. This can be hard for the business to manage with all the customer records that are needed. An inaccurate customer management database can damage relations because mistakes are made. These mistakes can be down to staff not knowing what level of service customers have, whether they are on a trial, or when their subscription period ends.  

To avoid this, you need to utilize an effective customer database that can categorize where in the sales process an individual is and previous interactions they have had with your company. It should also track the current status of a customer’s membership.  

MYFUNDBOX let you implement scalable, manageable data backups with regular intervals of time to manage customers' data properly.  

2. Managing Billing frequency

Your business is never aimed to stay stagnant; growth is its ultimate aim. Make sure you choose the best recurring billing software that is able to manage payments, clients, and user base at any frequency.  

Software should be able to handle payments on monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, annually, or as personalized by the company or the customer.  

The flexible billing service option may increase efficiency for business owners since invoicing and sending out paper bills is not necessary. The flexibility of accepting payments can streamline the accounts receivable process for business owners. Customers should have a variety of options available for subscription billing services, such as credit card payments and debit card payments.  

MYFUNDBOX supports multiple billing models which include one-time payments, subscriptions, and mixed billing.  

3. Failed transactions management

With recurring transactions, failed transactions rise too. A system should inform its clients about failed transactions automatically to save time. With hundreds and thousands of clients subscribing to your services, it will become difficult for a business to manually track each transaction.  

Therefore, businesses need a way to automatically highlight when transactions have not been processed and to inform customers of failure. From there, the payment system can automatically resolve the issue by finding a solution for payment to be made. Also by allowing payment retries avoiding involuntary churn is possible. Or the system cuts off the customer so they don’t get access to the products/services until the payment has been made.   

MYFUNDBOX provides a better solution to handle the failed transaction by sending an email notification to the customer by every half an hour to resume their transactions. This is done efficiently with dunning management automatically taking care of all payment failures.   

4. Multi-Currency and Language Support 

Offering multi-currency and language support enables businesses to expand their market reach, enhance customer experience, increase sales and revenue, improve operational efficiency, gain a competitive advantage, and comply with local regulations. 

While some subscription businesses only offer their products to customers in one country, those offering subscriptions or content services can often be global. This can cause numerous problems with billing customers, whose charges may fluctuate with exchange rates or can’t read the bill because of language problems.  

A good subscription billing system should be able to manage the invoicing no matter what country the customer is located in.  

75% of consumers, to be precise – are more likely to purchase from a brand if their website and product information are available in their native language.- So, ultimately offering multi-lingual support will boost sales massively.  

MYFUNDBOX provides multi currencies and languages to easily let you create invoices, communicate and receive payments without any barriers.  

5. Payment gateways support

The major challenge with a single payment gateway is its dependency.  

According to Statista, only 6% of businesses did not experience an unplanned outage in 2019. On the other hand, 20% experienced it twice a year and 61% experienced it more than twice a year. 

So, if that single payment provider experiences technical issues or downtime, it could disrupt the business's ability to accept payments and result in revenue loss. Implying that your customers will not be able to make any purchases until the issue is resolved. This could lead many customers to churn out of the business.   

The best subscription billing software should be able to integrate you with multiple payment gateways, in order to receive payments without any hassle from any part of the world.  

Providing multiple payment gateways could charge your business graph upwards in multiple sectors. The idea of a single payment platform seems smart to many new business owners because it simplifies the process. But having multiple payment gateways actually offers a ton of advantages that help make your business more profitable. From avoiding downtime to going global without glitches, there comes a package that will benefit you down the road in your business.  

MYFUNDBOX works with financial partners which include Stripe, Amazon, GoCardless, and more online payment gateways to let you receive payments from more than 25 countries, in any currency with just a simple click.  

There are numerous challenges that subscription businesses face while setting up their services and maintaining their customer relations. One of the only ways that businesses can overcome this is by using an effective recurring payment system that can address these issues.  

The efficiency, ease of use, and features of a recurring billing system can make or break the operations of a business. Get a system that will help you to manage your customers’ subscriptions, offer support, keep costs low, and increase efficiency.  

MYFUNDBOX will help you in overcoming all of your subscription billing challenges, which in turn help in improving your business productivity as well as client retention in a big way.