Version 1.7.0 brings a brand new feature to Chargify: Taxes!
The ability to define taxes in Chargify is something that many of you, especially those in the EU, have been asking for awhile.
Check out the documentation here: http://docs.chargify.com/taxes
As always, If you have any questions, give us a shout on twitter (@chargify /cc @npverni).
A lot of great companies are teaming up with Chargify to make our product even better, and to give our merchants even more flexibility with their apps and billing systems. Check out all of our third party integrations below, and be sure to check our Partner Ecosystem page, as the list keeps growing!
Zferral
A few weeks ago, we teamed up with Zferral, which allows Chargify customers to easily create affiliate programs for recurring payment applications with ease. Chargify makes the recurring billing of their customers easy and Zferral does the same for affiliate management and payments.
With this integration, Chargify reports on revenue for signups and renewals. This integration also eliminates the time and effort required to operate an affiliate program, and makes it extremely simple to reward the people referring others to your services.
Formstack
Last August, Formstack announced that it had switched its billing system from something they had built themselves to Chargify. Chargify’s integration with Formstack provides a seamless way for businesses to manage recurring payments from their customers.
Formstack users can now use Chargify with a Formstack web form to create recurring online payments, collect membership and subscription payments, and even accept coupons.
Over the past few months, we have been working really hard to make Chargify an even better product by enhancing the product as a whole as well as the current features and adding new features based on our customer’s feedback and recommendations.
What Have We Been Working On?
Coupon Enhancements
Our most recent improvement was to our coupon feature. Thanks to your feedback on ways to improve our coupon functionality, we have released 3 new coupon features. There is now a recurring coupons feature, remaining credit feature, and the ability to delay application of a coupon until after the free trial ends.
The recurring coupon feature allows you to configure coupons to continue to apply after the initial signup and gives you the ability to have a coupon recur indefinitely or for a fixed period of time. The remaining credit feature allows your customers to use a coupon that is greater than what their subscription costs and as a result have a credit towards their next payment.
Statements are a great way for both you and your customers to see a line-item breakdown of the charges, payments, credits, and activity for a subscription account on a period-by-period basis. We “pre-released” this feature 2 weeks ago and on Friday we finalized that release.
For any subscription, you can switch to the Statements view and then page between the usage periods for an at-a-glance view of everything that has affected the subscription balance. This is really handy when reviewing someone’s account history.
What’s really great is that you can also share these Statements with the customer via email. If you select the option, Chargify will automatically send out a pretty, HTML-formatted email to the customer when their statement period closes. You guys have been asking for line-item ability on receipts for a while, and this is our solution for that. Statements can completely replace your existing receipts, but they can also be used in conjunction if you choose.
Back in October we announced that we were on the verge of becoming PCI compliant. Today we are happy to announce that Chargify is officially Level 1 PCI compliant. The Chargify team worked really hard to make this happen and it’s a great step for both Chargify and our merchants.
Why is this important?
Being PCI Level 1 compliant means we’ve been thoroughly evaluated by outside auditors to ensure we run a “tight ship” (see our certification here). Level 1 compliance is the highest certification and requirement for large processing companies. These standards dictate everything from how we secure physical infrastructure to what processes software developers can use to update production systems.
PCI Level 1 reaches into many parts of Chargify and makes us a better company for it.
This is a huge benefit to our merchants. By letting Chargify handle credit card data, our merchants can off-load almost all PCI responsibilities. It took us 9 months to do everything needed to reach PCI Level 1, and that’s something few companies want to go through if they can easily avoid it.
Be on the lookout
In the upcoming weeks we will cover what it took to become PCI compliant and how you as our merchants can make sure you too are abiding by all standards.
This is a great achievement for the Chargify team!
We recently added the capability to export information from your Chargify account into a .CSV file. You can export from the following tabs:
Simply login to your account, go to your account dashboard and select one of the tabs. You will now see the “Export” link.
Sort by product ID, email address, account creation date and more.
Have questions? Feel free to visit the support section or find us on Twitter @chargify.
As promised, here is our post on the ins and outs of coupons within Chargify. Many merchants seem to be confused about when you can and can’t use a coupon. With Chargify, you can create one-time coupons to give your customers a discount at signup. Currently, coupons can only be used during the initial creation of the subscription and cannot be used during or to extend a free trial period. After the coupon is applied, customers will be charged the normal amount at the next assessment.
Types of coupons
Chargify allows you to create two types of coupons: amount coupons and percentage coupons. An amount coupon gives your customer a flat dollar amount discount while a percentage coupon gives your customer a discount equal to a specified percentage of the product’s base price.
If you haven’t noticed yet, Chargify Dunning strategies just got a whole lot more customizable! Our latest release gives you more control over how long failed renewals are retried, and what action to take at every step along the way.
How it used to be…
The old Chargify dunning strategies lacked the ability to truly customize when customer communications were sent. Either you had us send the dunning emails or you didn’t. Either way, failed renewals would trigger retries for either 14 or 21 days, at which point the subscription would always be automatically canceled if no successful payment was made.
The new way…
You decide! We’ve renamed the Settings tab for Dunning to “Retries and Dunning” and broken the configuration into two logical sections: Retries and Final Action and Dunning.
We’re making a small change to the Chargify API and we wanted you to know about it. If you use the API to pull Transactions or create Credits, then you’ll want to read on to see what’s changing. If you don’t do either of these things, you shouldn’t need to change anything. Here are the details of the change and the new functionality that’s coming with it:
What’s Changing
We are changing the way Chargify “Credit” Transactions work behind the scenes. Today, Credits deduct an amount from a Subscription’s balance, but are represented with a positive “amount”. For example:
Old Subscription Balance: $40
Applied Credit Amount: $30
————————————————
New Subscription Balance: $10
Since it would be nice to also adjust the balance up in some cases, we’re introducing Adjustments. Adjustments with positive amounts make the balance go up, Adjustments with negative amounts make the balance go down (like Credits).
Old Subscription Balance: $40
Applied Adjustment 1: -$30
Applied Adjustment 2: $ 5
————————————————
New Subscription Balance: $15
Internally, we’re converting all existing Credits to Adjustments.
A few days ago, we changed our pricing so that we could provide better care and additional features to thousands of Chargify customers. Although the change in pricing was the result of careful analysis of the way people have used Chargify over the past year, we didn’t communicate this change properly. In fact, our communication was non-existent, which was a major mistake (you can read more about what I learned from this on my blog and hear from our CEO).
After listening to your passionate feedback on the price change, responding to hundreds of your emails and tickets, and speaking to many of you on the phone, it became clear that we had to make some adjustments while standing firm about not offering free plans.
Here’s what we’re doing to move forward:
More and more, the answer to the question in the Title of this blog entry is “Yes!”
Here are 4 examples of interesting things that Chargify merchants are doing…
1. Simple, Flat-Rate Billing
Let’s say you have a business that charges for access to data in a database you’ve compiled from many sources. Your customers are professionals who save a lot of time by accessing the data you’ve compiled. You want to charge them $25/mo, $50/mo, or $100/mo, depending on what level of access they want.
To do this, you will set up 3 Products in Chargify:
2. Flat-Rate Billing, Monthly & Yearly, 15-day Free Trial on Monthly Plans
Starting with example #1, let’s add a yearly plan that gives the buyer a better deal if they pay for the whole year, and let’s add a 15-day free trial to all the monthly plans.
Since we entered private beta, one of the most requested features has been PayPal merchant services support. PayPal’s Website Payments products ease the pain of finding a gateway and merchant account, making it simple to start charging customer cards.
This week, we introduced support for PayPal Website Payments Pro in the United States. Next week, we will add support for PayPal accounts in Canada and the United Kingdom. We also plan to support PayPal Payflow Pro in the near future.
As a developer, I tend to like clean, concise URLs that map directly to my RESTful resources. Want to view a subscription?
GET /subscriptions/77
Want to edit it?
GET /subscriptions/77/edit
The URLs for Chargify hosted pages followed this convention. Updating credit card details loosely maps to editing the subscription to change the payment information. So, we had:
GET /h/subscriptions/77/edit/abcdef0123abcdef0123abcdef0123abcdef0123
With the ‘h’ part meaning our “hosted” namespace, and the gibberish at the end being a secret token.
Now, if I were a layperson, and IF I happened to glance at the URL for the page I was about to enter my credit card on, which one of the following would be more likely to give me warm fuzzies?
We’ve just released a new feature that allows you to add “components” to your products which your customers can purchase and be charged according to the quantity chosen. This is great for offering things like the following to your products:
What the heck are components?
We’ve built a new framework that is going to give you a lot of flexibility in defining your products, and we’re calling these “components”. If you think of the traditional “product matrix” you used to see on most websites selling a service, you would usually see their plans (or products) in the columns and row after row of optional and included things. Well, in Chargify these “things” are called “components” - they are the building blocks of your products that you use to add options, upgrades, and add-ons to enhance your offerings.
The following simplified graphic shows what I’m talking about.
Chargify is officially entering into public beta today, and we couldn’t be more excited!
Having originally launched at the TechCrunch50 Conference (http://techcrunch50.com) in San Francisco, CA on September 14th, 2009, we’ve been steadily growing our beta list this past 6 months while making numerous improvements and adding new features.
Some highlights/ improvements include:
The team here at Chargify has been hard at work on a bunch of new features. We just flipped the switch on two of these: Prorated Upgrades/Downgrades and Metered Components.
Metered Components
Metered Components give Sellers the ability to charge for a product on a per-usage basis. For example, a cell phone provider could charge $1 for each text message that was sent, or a Web Hosting company could charge for storage by the number of gigabytes used. Creating metered components is quick and easy. Simply give the component a name, specify the unit used to measure it, and give it a per unit price. Usage of metered components is tallied throughout the billing cycle and the charge is seamlessly integrated as a line item on the Customer’s next invoice.
For more information on how to create Metered Components, and how to record usage via the API, see:
We’ve been working hard over the last few months on releasing new features for Chargify, and have been excited with what we’ve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. And along with the performance and feature set of the application, we want to make sure Chargify looks as good as it works. So this week we’re rolling out the first in a series of user interface design updates that will continue to make Chargify a pleasant and beautiful environment in which to work.
We released several new features for Chargify this week that definitely deserve mention.
Multi-Site Support
Before, when you created a Chargify account, you were given 2 “sites”: 1) your “live” account and 2) your “test” account. This structure was somewhat limiting, both for us and our customers. We re-architected how Sites (now with a big “S”) work, and now, you can create as many Sites as you want, and you can move them in and out of test mode.
Each Site has its own Customers, Subscriptions, and Settings. This means each site configures its own:
This also opens us up to support other sorts of things in the future that aren’t compatible when you only have 1 production site… like multiple currencies. (We haven’t committed to a roadmap for multi-currency, but we do know the need is there and we want to make sure we’re ready).
Last week was a great week at Chargify. The team is normally spread out across the USA, but last week we all worked together in Sacramento, CA.
Two exciting and useful developments happened over the weekend:
Welcome to the Bullring, the blog dedicated entirely to empowering entrepreneurs and developers to start and run successful businesses based on recurring revenue models.
Let’s lay it out there. Recurring billing is a pain in the ass. Credit cards get declined for a million different reasons, you have to deal with upgrades/downgrades, proration, refunds, credits, customer communication, fraudulent transactions, and the list goes on. It’s no small task to implement a system that handles all of the potential pitfalls of billing on a recurring basis.
