How to Increase Your Revenue with Recurring Payments

Want to make sure you are making the most of your customer base? Well, it’s 2019 and everyone knows the way: that’s to switch your regular sales to the subscription model. Meaning, your customers interact with you just once, and then being charged for your products or services on a weekly or monthly basis. Pretty neat, right? Especially if you are a small outfit with everyone in your team being busy actually serving customers.

To be sure, you need some pretty solid software tools to achieve your subscription goals. According to market research, there are literally hundreds of software products and cloud services dedicated to this task alone. Most of them will charge you a good monthly fee to use their tools.

Luckily, if you process your credit card payments with Payment.Ninja, you are getting a wide range of business tools at no extra cost. And today we introduce our new and improved Subscriptions, a toolkit to manage all your recurring business portfolio.

Let’s explore what Payment.Ninja Subscriptions can do for you.

First, let’s set up your first Subscription plan.

How to set up a recurring payment plan

Go to the main menu at the Merchant Dashboard and click Subscriptions. Then click on the Big Blue Button at the top right which says Start Subscription.

(Alternatively, you can open a Customer Profile from the Customers screen and hit Start Subscription there. This way you wouldn’t need to select a customer later on.)

Once you do it, you’ll see a large dialog screen with a few details you need to enter. It looks like this.

So all you need to do is to look up your customer by typing her name or email in the search box, then enter the dollar amount and how often do you want to charge her.

A short description of your product or service is important too and will help avoid any confusion in the future. It will show in any of email or text communications we are automatically sending on your behalf regarding this Subscription, and also will be available on the customer’s card statement.

There are also a few additional options you can use if you like. The date of the first payment, which set for today by default, can be changed for some other day in the future. You can also set a stop date, after which no further payments will be charged on this Subscription plan. Alternatively, you can limit the number of payments instead, so to stop the plan after it ran several times.

All that’s left is to hit Start Subscription after entering all required info and you are all set. A confirmation pops-up and you can go back to your daily business routine.

Managing your Subscriptions

Once you set up your first recurring payment plan, you can monitor it in your Dashboard, on the Subscriptions screen. To make things easier, if you see the green Active tag on it, that means your recurring payment plan is good and current. It also tells you the date of the attempted last charge, it’s status, as well as the date of the next one.

If you want to see more details or do some work on the Subscription, just click the View Details link.

In addition to the brief information you’ve seen on the previous screen, you can check out the full transaction history in regard to your Subscription plan. Was there declined payments, or which card on the customer’s file was used for the payment, it’s all there and can be very handy when you discuss your business relationship with the customer.

There’re a few action buttons to the right of the information card, which you can use too.

Here what’s available:

Charge Now. Self-explanatory, allows you to make the next charge right now. The date of the next payment will be automatically adjusted according to the payment plan.

Print. In case you need the Subscription details and the transaction history on paper or in a PDF file to send over the email.

Change Subscription. Opens a form similar to that which you used to create a Subscription in the first place. You can amend pretty much anything in there, except of the customer.

The other 3 buttons are clearly separate from the ones above because they can stop or skip payments. We don’t want to do to it by mistake.

Skip Next Charge. Again, as per its name, skips the next scheduled payment cycle. The next date will be adjusted accordingly in the Subscription info.

Pause Subscription. Skips all payment occurancies indefinetly, until unpaused.

Cancel Subscription. Removes the payments schedule, but the history will still be available for your records.

We are excited to bring you all these new features, and can’t wait to hear your feedback. Is there something else we need to add to Payment.Ninja Subscriptions? You are always welcome to comment or talk with us in our 24×7 online chat.