FastSpring, a digital commerce startup that helps businesses sell subscriptions online, is expanding its platform to provide additional support to the SaaS market. New features like embedded checkouts, ACH payments, localized payments, and advanced reporting capabilities have been added to make it easier for global companies to adopt the FastSpring platform.
FastSpring currently works primarily with SaaS companies. Its payments, billing, and tax tools are designed to help businesses scale without needing to bring on full-time billing and payments teams. The company has spent 15 years working with SaaS and software companies. Its platform is capable of handling nearly every aspect of payments for businesses, including subscription management, tax collection, and remittance.
With the acceleration of subscription selling, particularly among small and mid-size businesses, pricing models have gotten more complex. Rather than just charging customers a flat monthly fee, more businesses today are optimizing prices and offering customers things like trial periods, prorated fees, or customizable billing intervals. While those sorts of flexible payment options have been shown to reduce customer churn, they can also increase overhead costs for companies if the options get too complex.
In an announcement about FastSpring’s new product offerings, Chief Product Officer Kurt Smith said enhanced features like customized purchasing experiences, dashboards displaying monthly recurring revenue, and tools for monitoring revenue trends have been specifically designed to take away the complexities of selling digital products online, so businesses can spend less time worrying about things like failed rebills and more time recapturing revenue and avoiding churn.
“With FastSpring’s recent product releases, we are introducing an evolved platform with new capabilities to support SaaS and software companies like never before,” Smith wrote. “FastSpring has built its reputation of being the most robust merchant of record solution on the market, and we are upholding that reputation.”
Competition among SaaS digital commerce platforms has never been greater. The number of subscription services catering to customers, both online and offline, soared in 2022. According to a survey by the market research firm C+R Research, consumers spend an average of $133 more each month on subscriptions than they realize. For media and entertainment services alone, the average number of paid subscriptions per consumer was 12 in 2020. Among millennials, that number rose to 17.
For businesses, managing all those subscriptions is no simple task. Executives focused on big-picture goals like enhancing product offerings and preventing customer churn can easily overlook seemingly-straightforward tasks like payment processing. That’s where companies like FastSpring come into play.
Startups like Chargify, FastSpring, Chargebee, and Recurly provide businesses with a way to quickly set up complex subscription systems without having to bring in outside experts or hire their own in-house teams. FastSpring also collects sales tax on behalf of its clients and provides tools for upselling, cross-selling, and other unique subscriptions.
As the SaaS market continues to expand, we’ll almost certainly see even more companies joining FastSpring in developing tools designed to help businesses manage digital subscriptions.
