Doing eCommerce with Zuora. What are the Options?
In a previous post, we’ve explored the idea that you could use Shopify to power a SaaS business, leveraging its commerce capabilities and put it to use for a subscription business. Does it work? Well, to keep it short, not really but go read that post to learn more. So what about the reverse? Instead of focussing on the ecommerce element, why not take the best subscription billing platform out there and doing ecommerce with it?
You take the most powerful recurring billing platform, basically the Lamborghini of subscription billing, with payment capabilities, revenue recognition, tax, CRM integration and app extensions, so you just add the ecommerce part, et voilà! You should be unstoppable, able to sell every single type of subscriptions with outstanding ecommerce experiences.
Let’s do it!
So let’s talk a bit about eCommerce and what you need to make it work. To get a fully functioning ecommerce and self-service website, a typical subscription website, you are going to need to think about the following: Product, Pricing, Sign-up, Login, Cart, Checkout, Order Complete, you are going to need to build and integrate that. We’re talking DevOps Infrastructure, Authentication, Access Management, Catalog, Payments, Address, Tax, Analytics integrations, Order Orchestration, Entitlement and Fulfilment Provisioning at a minimum. You’ll need to consider some middleware to get all of that working nicely together. Then layer on all the designs, promotion activities, business rules that your business will want to implement — e.g. buy 1, get 1 free (but not for everyone though!).
But wait there’s more! That’s just to get the basics in place. Commerce for subscriptions doesn’t stop at the initial purchase. What about the post-purchase experience of your subscriber? Account management pages with billing and customer details, potentially with renewal, upgrade, downgrade, payment updates, cancellation prevention flow, all of it will need to get build. And when custom-building ecommerce, you never know how long it will take.
Want to try to do different things such as free trials, usage-based charges, or stepped pricing easily? Except if you planned it initially, that will likely mean more development, more integration, more design work. Last but not least, subscription services can be sold worldwide, from day 1. Want to handle ecommerce with multi-currencies, multi-languages, multi-locale and different timezones, as well as satisfy countries’ different regulatory requirements (hello California cancellation rules, goodbye sanctioned countries!)? That will also need to build!
Let’s get real
So yes you can custom-build your ecommerce experience. You can have your developer team build, integrate and maintain a whole commerce platform that isn’t core to your product or business. And Zuora being the best subscription platform out there provides handy SDKs that developers can pick up to speed up the work related to Billing.
But at the end of the day, ecommerce is so much more than just billing or payments. You will still need to build and design a website, develop the ecommerce and self-service logic, and develop integrations with many additional services such as CRM, analytics, entitlements, authentication, address validations, shipping and fulfillments, and more. Those things take time, and not all will have a modern SDK like Zuora! And that’s for the basics here. Things like omnichannel capabilities, personalisation and segmentation of the commerce experience, experimentation of experiences, upgrade and downgrade path, smart retention logic, upselling capabilities, those also requires further building. And if you are a big brand, commerce will need to be fast, secure and pixel-perfect. That means more investments in framework, technologies, certifications.
At Limio, we believe in a different approach. An approach that helps you to get a faster ROI with Zuora, an approach that speeds up time-to-launch and time-to-market, ones that does the heavy-lifting for you and lets you focus on your core business rather than eCommerce. A way that does for the subscription world what Shopify did for the retail world. And that’s where Limio Subscription Commerce Platform comes in!
Limio streamlines the creation of a modern subscription purchasing and self-service experience with its WYSIWYG Page Builder, 50+ ready-to-use components, shop builder technology, integrated Order Orchestration, Salesforce integration and more! We help you to leverage the full flexibility of Zuora’s subscription catalog, enabling you to efficiently create online and offline expereinces for the entire subscriber lifecycle through an intuitive, no-code or low-code platform.
Limio seamlessly integrates with Zuora right out-of-the-box, along with CRM platforms like Salesforce, analytics tools such as GA, and various other providers for authentication, access management, payments, address verification, and tax calculation. That sounds like a lot less work than custom-building eCommerce, doesn’t it?
It’s pretty clear the world is hungry for Subscription Commerce solutions that don’t require lots of work to build, integrate and maintain. At Limio, we believe that if you are building a subscription business, you’ll have a better shot at it with Limio than by custom-building so get in touch if you want to put us to the test! 😉
