Oct 06

Some Little New Features, and Some Big Ones

| More

We’re always devoting some dev cycles to new features - some little, some big.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve released a few little features that will make your lives better.

And over the past few months, we’ve been working to satisfy another segment of merchants, who need better reporting tools to manage their growth. These are not released, yet, but they are close enough for a peek.

(A note about all images below: you can click to see a larger version.)

Little Features (available now)

Stripe payment gateway. New merchants have started requesting this at an increasing rate, so we got this added last weekend. Now you can have the convenience of easy credit card processing through Stripe, plus the rich features of Chargify to manage your business.

Delete subscription, and optionally, a customer and credit card. This has been an annoyance for merchants. No more!



Big Features (available soon)

As merchants grow, some of them want to watch things like churn and lifetime value, so they can make better decisions. We’ve had a small team working on this for several months, and we’re in the final weeks of optimization and bug fixes.

We’ll open this up to a handful of larger merchants first, to make sure the reports yield accurate and expected results, and then grow the group size as we implement feedback.

It’s important that we get these right (and quick in terms of rendering time) before we release them to many users. That’s why we’re approaching this slowly and methodically.

As these new features come out of beta, they will be added to various Chargify price plans. For instance, things like churn and lifetime value will probably be added starting at our $239 or $459 plans, and new revenue reports will probably be added starting at our $129 plan.

Our focus has been on churn and lifetime value, since they’ve been getting the most demand from merchants. Both are right around the corner. Then comes new & improved revenue reporting.

Reporting is an area that will continue to grow indefinitely. In time, some of our smaller segments of merchants will see industry-specific reports.

Very excited about the new reporting. Congrats to your and your team.

The LTV and churn reports are great, but compared to extensive revenue reporting they seem more like "nice-to-haves." I'm sure you guys are working on it, but the most practically useful metric for me would be to see daily or monthly revenues (either total revenues or broken down by product) on a line graph and to be able to customize the date ranges. That would satisfy a lot of my reporting needs. But I'm only speaking for myself.
By Matt Sellers on October 9, 2012 at 03:42 PM
Hey Matt,

We're working on better revenue reports, too.

Most demand was for the LTV and churn stuff, but we didn't forget about revenue reports... they're just a little behind the other two.

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 10, 2012 at 02:54 PM
Great work Lance and team,
Just deleted all my live test subscriptions. So fresh and so clean.

Will all these reports be able to be aggregated across currency sites? You could value them in the preferred currency (not just USD smile ) using a service like xe.com?
Thinking global wink

Cheers Simon
By Simon Lampen on October 10, 2012 at 03:43 PM
Hi Simon,

Thanks!

The current implementation is per-site, so it's in whatever currency is the currency of that site.

One step at a time grin

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 10, 2012 at 03:50 PM
Thanks Lance,
FYI our 5th currency with Chargify had it's first paid subscription yesterday. Woot Woot! So cross site reporting and maintenance will become more of a pain as we get more global smile

Cheers Simon
By Simon Lampen on October 10, 2012 at 03:57 PM
My subscription page does not look at all like the one above - would love to delete old test subscriptions but there is no option
By Paul Beauchemin on October 10, 2012 at 04:13 PM
Nice! Looking forward to clearing out our test accounts on the live sites smile

It'd be good also if you could delete just the stored credit card - in case we want to keep a test subscription on the live site - but not mess up our numbers by accidentally billing it.

Keep up the great work <3 Chargify.
By Ryan Baker on October 10, 2012 at 04:28 PM
Would love to get LTV for the smaller monthly packages as that would help us budget for marketing to get more customers to grow into the larger packages.

Great work guys.
By Raj on October 10, 2012 at 04:58 PM
Love it! Great work.

Is there a way to delete a blank customer who doesn't have a subscription? It appears I can only delete subscriptions and customers attached ... but if I have a customer record with no subscription I click on it but there's no way to delete them.

Joe
By Joe Winke on October 10, 2012 at 09:34 PM
Hey Simon,

I see your situation! Congrats on having sites running in 5 currencies! That's pretty cool. I don't have any stats in front of me, but I think you're leading the charge into multi-currency!

We will indeed make things better for that use case as we have dev time. We're hiring more US-based Rails devs, so if you know any...

Thanks.

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 14, 2012 at 12:45 PM
Hey Paul (Beauchemin),

I'm 99% sure that all merchants should see the new subscription "actions".

I know your comment was 4 days ago and maybe things have changed/appeared, but if you're not seeing the new options anywhere, please open a ticket at help.chargify.com and get them to help. Jay in Level 1 support can probably help, and if he can't, then he'll bump you to James or Kori in Level 2.

Thanks.

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 14, 2012 at 12:48 PM
Hey Raj,

Most folks I've spoken with said that churn is more important to them than LTV... that they need to know churn as early as possible in their biz, but that LTV "can wait" until they have a bit more history and customers (and, by defintion, we can't calculate a meaningful LTV until some "lifetime" has passed).

I'd love to hear your thoughts. My email is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

We definitely want to make a compelling offering, balanced against our desire to increase revenue for things (like analytics) that actually cost quite a bit to develop.

Again, your input will help in our thoughts, so email me if you have time.

Thanks.

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 14, 2012 at 12:54 PM
Hey Joe,

I guess there's no way (currently) to delete a customer who has no subs. Right off the bat, the only thing I can think of is to add a sub to his account, simply so you can then delete him grin

I know that's bass ackwards.

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 14, 2012 at 12:56 PM
Ryan,

We do get that request once in a while. I don't have an ETA for you, but it'll fill in someday. Sooner, if we get more requests.

Michael Klett (co-founder/prod mgr) is starting to get a little bandwidth to do things like that, as we build our dev team. For instance, I believe he did the Delete Subscription piece... it was high on the list of merchant annoyances that we want to start solving, and your request is on that list, too.

If you know any US-based Rails devs...

Thanks.

--- Lance
By Lance Walley on October 14, 2012 at 12:59 PM
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.