31 karma · joined January 21, 2009
You also have to factor in chargeback fees, processing for non-qualified transactions (i.e. corporate cards, rewards cards, int'l cards, Amex cards, all of which cost far more than the often quoted 2-2.5% "qualified" transactions.
Thanks.
Unlike the others, SaaSy is all-inclusive.
Regarding pricing, it's true there are less expensive-appearing services (though don't forget that without SaaSy handling everything for you you'd still have to pay 3.5-4% in e-commerce merchant fees for every order, once you factor in the true costs), but they end up costing you far more when you factor in software development costs and the years you will spend if you go it alone or use an existing basic service that appears to cost less. Remember, it's not just building what you think you need today, it's also adding on to it endlessly as your needs grow and change, and then there's the maintenance. That's just the tech development side, what about dealing with taxes, say in the EU if you have any EU customers, or a dozen other similar issues you'd otherwise be on your own to figure out and then develop a solution for? Take a look at this matrix to see what the cheaper, more basic solutions are missing that SaaSy provides for those launching or running existing SaaS businesses, and you'll see why SaaSy is actually quite a deal relative to the basic recurring billing services: http://saasy.com/matrix.php
In addition to saving you all the time, money, and hassle of building your own e-commerce system, the incremental profit you'll earn from utilizing our features for growing your average order size, lifetime value, and optimizing your conversion rate far outweigh the higher fees. Each feature you take advantage of can increase your revenue by a few percent, and it doesn't take too many increases of 2-4% here and there to add up to an overall profit improvement that far outweighs the few extra points that Saasy's all-in-one service costs. For example, cross-selling; upselling; add-ons; bundling; discounts & promotions; order pages in local currencies and languages; Facebook/Twitter referral management; a breadth of payment methods available for your customers; an order page customized to fit the rest of your site or designed to fit your preferences; the ability to test and tweak different order page structures and merchandising ideas; reseller management; analytics; outside help with PPC, SEO, affiliate, and general web marketing; fraud protection, and the list goes on. And then there's the impact our phenomenal customer service will have on your churn rate and the word-of-mouth sales it generates to have so many "wowed" end users out there talking up the customer experience of working with you. SaaSy also reduces your internal support expenses as they relate to order and payment customer support, since we handle that for you.
If you're up for spending up to a couple of years building and improving on an e-commerce infrastructure, SaaSy isn't for you. But if time to market is important and you'd rather focus on developing your product/service and doing sales and marketing instead of dealing with the distracting complexities of building your own e-commerce system either from scratch or by building all the needed functionality around one of the cheaper, more basic solutions, then you'll want to take a close look at SaaSy.
When you view our features list and the competitive matrix, think through the costs of developing your own infrastructure over the next few years vs. what your development team could instead be focusing on, factor in that you're not going to need to pay the 3.5-4% in e-commerce merchant fees for every order which you would be doing otherwise, consider not only the reduced expenses but the new revenue you'll now be able to generate, and you'll start to see why our rates are actually quite a deal, saving you money, helping you to significantly grow your revenue and to thrive relative to your competitors.
“PayPal’s reporting is extremely limited.”
“Virtually impossible to use for serious businesses without extensive external code or a system to manage customer flow/cross/upsells.”
“You spend too much precious time on e-commerce tasks and way too little time on marketing and dev.” “For business-to-business products, clients do not take you seriously as a potential supplier if PayPal is your main payment method.”
“PayPal has very strict rules about the orders they are willing to let through, so merchants end up with fewer orders going through/lost revenue. They are quite picky about declining certain credit and debit cards other services would otherwise accept.”
“I log into my PayPal account and what do I see? “For my protection” they have limited the ability of my account to withdraw or send money but most severely, they also disallowed the account to receive payments! Frantically, I go to MacGraPhoto’s buy page, click buy and see a message “The seller can’t receive payments at this time”. At about the same time I get an email from a potential customer that says that he can’t buy the bundle. In the server log I see other people trying buy the bundle and leaving. Lost sales. Not good. Not good at all. My PayPal’s page lists lots of things that I need to provide to PayPal regarding my personal identity and regarding the sales. Some requests are totally not relevant to the case or to our business…And, it’s totally impossible to directly talk to the people who actually decide…I receive another email from PayPal. The subject was new: “PayPal appeal denied”…So, now the money (most of which is not even ours but of our bundle members) is held for 6 months. Sure, they are “making every effort to minimize any disruption to your business”. Sure, no disruption at all…Needless to say, I didn’t get any response not after 72 hours and not after a week. I called support again and was told that they won’t respond me because my appeal was denied and they don’t reopen cases…I won’t be using PayPal to sell anything from now. They have grown too big to be efficient and caring for their customers. Quick to make totally disruptive decisions and to dismiss legitimate businesses without really taking a look at what it is…They took the liberty to totally halt our business, to cause lots of lost sales and a major cash flow blow only because we got successful with one promotion, after being their customers for a long time. Right, they “regret any inconvenience this may cause”. They are “making every effort to minimize any disruption to your business”. If you’re selling anything and use PayPal as your only payment option, I urge you to reconsider. They can cut your oxygen supply right at peak of your success, of course “for your own protection”…we decided to leave PayPal as our e-commerce service at Apparent Software and moved to FastSpring.”
“No branding on PayPal order pages means fewer purchases! My order page needs to blend in with the rest of my site or too many people will bail on us”
“No fulfillment support”
“Revenue is lost because a decent number of customers are located in countries PayPal won’t accept payments within for whatever reason.”
“As much as I like rolling my own solutions, it’s too complicated to offer quantity discounts, coupon codes, and multiple currencies on top of the PayPal API alone.”
“Tax responsibilities are on the client, ugh.” (US and EU VAT)
“Huge problems with spam filters on PayPal — we automatically send out logins once an order is processed yet a higher percentage is not received than is received.”
“They have virtually no fraud screening.”
“(PayPal is) more difficult to set up – documentation spread all over the place, and forum answers sometimes misleading”
“There is no support for discount codes/vouchers (this really surprised me)”
“No experience with (PayPal) customer service yet- but I’ve heard bad things”
“Their system is very clunky, as far as looking up orders, pulling reports, checking a history etc…”
“PayPal heavily favors the purchaser not the vendor selling, as in chargebacks or disputes etc.”
“I don’t get notification of orders on a consistent basis, I have to login and check orders daily”
"We sell off multiple sites with the same PayPal account and the reporting to figure out which sites generated which sales is a nightmare”
“Lacks professionalism”
“Their UI stinks, it takes me a while to figure out how to do things in their system”
“I have heard too much about PayPal’s abuses to trust them. When I see something where the only payment option is PayPal, I select a different option: not buying.”
“No ability to offer upsells (at least that I can figure out)”
Some samples: "I'm going to come out and say it: FastSpring is awesome. I haven't experienced customer service this good in my life. Every query I've had, from stupid questions to difficult questions to bug reports has been dealt with brilliantly." - Daniel Kennett, kennetnet
“FastSpring is definitely the best company I have ever interacted with (note: the best company ever, not just related to e-commerce).” - Ruman Stankov, Triland Inc.
SaaSy is all-inclusive, and once you see the list of features and comparison chart you realize that the basic services like Chargify, Recurly, Spreedly, etc. are actually missing 90% of the solution you'll need, leaving most of the software development and administrative work for you to do over the next couple of years. As opposed to leaving everything to SaaSy and being able to instead focus on growing your business.
For basic integrations, you can launch your subscription service in about 3 days and have the solution fully outsourced and handled by SaaSy, from your global taxes to chargebacks, payments, PCI, order and payment support, global currency payments, localized language-based order pages, fraud prevention, branded order and customer subscription page, cross-selling, subscription trial periods, etc. The list goes on and on, as SaaSy is truly an all-inclusive e-commerce and subscription management service that frees you up to focus on your business, and keeps you out of the complex e-commerce infrastructure business.
To see TechCrunch's take on SaaSy ("Online Subscription Billing Is Still A Hassle, SaaSy Aims To Change That"), see: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/online-subscription-billing...