Online Content

For online content publishers, the future is clear – more and more people will consume content online. Whether you are an established offline content provider looking to create an online presence, or a digital site looking to expand and capitalize on your success, your choice of billing system will dramatically affect your ability to penetrate new markets and retain your customers.

Subscription Billing

An online merchant who is able to master the power that subscription billing offers will benefit from a steady, growing, and predictable revenue stream. However, subscription billing is about much more than just processing payments on a recurring basis. A billing system tuned for subscriptions must be able to handle:

• Payment failures and retries
• Fraud screening optimized for digital merchants
• Friendly fraud chargeback fighting
• Event driven customer communications
• Sophisticated billing models based on time or usage
• Global customer acquisition and payment methods

Perhaps most importantly, the billing system must have a relentless focus on maximizing customer retention since the smallest increase will result in big revenue increases due to the power of Average Customer Lifetime Value (ACLV) in a subscription business model.

Microtransactions

Online content comes in many shapes and sizes – from music to digital art to exclusive news and research – and each unique site requires a business model specific to their market demographics. Because of this, a billing solution for online content providers must have the flexibility to support a wide variety of business models in addition to subscriptions:

• One time purchases
• Microtransactions
• Virtual currency or tokens
• Virtual goods
• Usage-based billing (consumption billing)

It must also have the ability to easily support a near unlimited number of pricing plans to take advantage of regional pricing, affiliate networks and customer preferences, while maintaining the scalability to handle spikes that viral marketing brings.

We also help merchants with microtransaction business models with their customer retention by providing the right tools for customer communication, pricing and promotions in order to enable multiple repeat purchases from their users. We make it easy for company executives to tune their business in order to optimize customer acquisition and retention.

Fraud Management

Online content providers are no strangers to the world of fraud. In high-margin online businesses, an interesting tension point exists between stopping fraud and maximizing average customer lifetime value. In high-margin businesses, false positives (i.e., incorrectly refusing a valid transaction) can cost merchants much more than the individual fraudulent chargeback. Allowing too many fraudulent transactions, however, can result in a chargeback rate that is too high, bringing fines and penalties from the credit card associations. By providing tools to control fraud while simultaneously mitigating revenue losses due to chargebacks, Vindicia helps our merchants strike the perfect balance in their fraud management strategies.

Affiliate Relationships

Managing affiliate relationships is often a key factor in increasing your customer base and maximizing revenue. However, affiliate networks can quickly spin out of control – making it difficult to understand which relationships are the most profitable and which ones are actually hurting your bottom line by bringing in a high level of fraudulent transactions or chargebacks. Vindicia’s solution has the ability to track affiliate activity and help merchants categorize affiliate relationships based on profitability.

Learn More

• Subscription Billing
• Customer Retention
• Fraud Management
• Vindicia CashBox