All You Need To Know About ReCharge Payments

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Are you looking for a reliable recurring billing app for your Shopify Store? If so, ReCharge Payments could be the solution for you.

This review takes an in-depth look at its features, hits and misses to help you determine if it is the right fit for your subscription business model.

But first about the subscription market.

The subscription industry has grown by more than 100% in the last five years. This exponential growth has attracted top retailers and consumer brand manufacturers.

How does it work?

Subscriptions work well if you provide products that customers need to reorder regularly. It also comes in handy when you offer a service that customers use repeatedly.

This new way of selling helps to increase your customerโ€™s average lifetime value through repeat sales.

Customers who subscribe here want to gain exclusive access to your products. This is where you offer membership.

Each category has its own unique set of challenges. This has to do with reducing the cost of acquisition, churn and increasing average order value. However, combining referral marketing tactics, user-generated content and customer loyalty helps subscription businesses grow.

Sounds good?

What is ReCharge Payments?

Recharge payments - homepage

ReCharge Payments is the leading Shopify subscription solution for online businesses. It makes it easy to transform one-time products into subscription options.

It was built back in 2014 with the goal of making payments easy for customers. This was primarily by looking for ways for customers to reorder products. Now, ReCharge Payments boasts a client base of over 10,000 businesses.

ReCharge Payments Review: Key Features

Letโ€™s get started on what ReCharge Payments has to offer. Ready?

Subscription management

ReCharge Payments uses rule sets that control the entire subscription processes. This includes:

  • Products offered for subscription
  • How often the customer is charged
  • How often a product is shipped
  • Discounts offered for subscribing
  • Set an expiration
  • Create pre-paid gift subscriptions

Customers who order a subscription product will be charged when they sign up. ReCharge Payments will then vault the customerโ€™s credit card with the selected payment processor.

Each time a customer gets charged, ReCharge Payments automatically updates an order so that you manage it from Shopify. In addition, orders connect to all Shopify integrations that deal with fulfillment, accounting, and inventory.

Customer experience

recharge payments customer experience

Most recurring billing apps require customers to make separate orders for recurring subscriptions and one-time purchases. However, ReCharge Payments doesnโ€™t change the checkout experience for customers once they subscribe.

When a customer opts to cancel their subscription to your products, they can do so without going through you. This enhances flexibility on their part to pause, edit and cancel subscriptions.

Customers also have the option to rearrange their deliveries in case of anything. They can do this without reaching out to your support team through their account. In addition, they can change the frequency of subscriptions and shipping for specific products without repeated entry of credit card information.

As you can see, ReCharge Payments took into consideration the customer experience and ensured that it was easy for your customers to manage their subscriptions. All services are optimized for mobile devices so customers can make changes on the go.

Customization

recharge payments customization

Change your customer portal to match the look and feel of your brand. With ReCharge Payments, you can add or remove functionality to give customers the same experience across your store.

You can also customize ReCharge Paymentโ€™s email template library with the type of design that best represents your brand.

Order management

To add a product to a new order, search and select the product from the menu and set product parameters. This can include delivery frequency, quantity, and shipment dates.

To add an existing subscription, ReCharge Payments provides a drop-down menu where you can include the product.

The Orders section lets you check whether a customer has any error in the status. It has three tabs namely the processed, upcoming and errors tabs. Once you click on Errors, it presents a table showing all order errors and their causes.

Inventory management

Its inventory management systems automatically integrate into your platformโ€™s inventory system. It keeps tracking your stock counts using your stock keeping unit (SKU).

If the subscription has out of stock products, ReCharge Payments holds and marks the order as โ€˜Inventory Error. You can even set automated email alerts to notify customers when their order is out of stock.

Payment management

Using ReCharge Payments, customers get to update their billing and shipping details for successful order processing.

In recurring billing, you have to deal with dunning. Dunning is where you have to make persistent demands on a customer to pay for products received. You have to balance error handling and customer experience.

Let me explain why.

A customerโ€™s credit card can get declined due to expiry, credit card limits, corporate policies or a block made by the customer. When you freeze the customerโ€™s account too fast, it will be unfair for them.

On the other hand, when youโ€™re too lenient to collect, it could have detrimental effects on your business.

This is why ReCharge Payments performs automatic dunning. This is through systems that do the following:

  • Counter check cards
  • Anticipating expiration dates
  • Sending email reminders for users to update their credit cards
  • Discontinuing product delivery for accounts that donโ€™t pay
  • Investigating why credit cards have been declined
  • Suspending accounts and reaching out to them

ReCharge Payments also connects with Stripe that automatically updates expiring credit cards for customers.

Customer retention

ReCharge Payments boasts the customer retention feature to help businesses reduce subscription bounce rates. It lets customers select their reason for canceling their subscription and then offering a custom incentive to get them to continue their subscription.

The first method is preventive. Here you can prevent a customer from canceling for a number of days. You also have the option of restricting cancellation such that customers will have to email you directly to do so.

The second method is where you provide an incentive to get customers to stay. You create cancellation reasons then promotions for when a customer selects.

Below are ways ReCharge Payments helps you offer incentives to continue the subscription.

  • Delay subscription

You can request your customer to delay cancellation for a week, two weeks or even up to three weeks.

  • Apply discount

For this to work, you need to create the discount first and display it in the customized response. Remember to specify the discount amount beforehand.

  • Skip next charge

This works well when the customer feels they cannot make the subscription at that time.

  • Swap product

This option lets customers choose another product to stay subscribed.

Once you enable either of the above options, a call-to-action will be created on the second step of your customer-facing view. You can only apply one incentive for cancellation.

Reporting

ReCharge Payments offers customer reports to help you assess cancellation reasons. You could also send surveys to collect more customer insights to provide an improved experience.

The information you can expect to download include customers per item, inactive customers, subscriber per interval, and discounts among other reports.

Security

You might be wondering:

Can ReCharge Payments get hacked and leak customerโ€™s credit card numbers?

ReCharge Payments doesnโ€™t store credit cards. It uses a third party credit card vaulting service that is PCI-compliant. By PCI standards, it means that it has met these six categories.

  • Protect cardholder information
  • Maintain a secure network
  • Regularly monitor and test networks
  • Have an Information Security Policy
  • Keep a Vulnerability Management Program
  • Have strong access control measures

ReCharge Payments uses the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This standard reduces credit card fraud through its exposure.

Integrations

Recharge payments integrations

And now comes the best part.

ReCharge Payments allows seamless integrations to ensure different parts of your business work together. It integrates with CartHook to help you increase revenue by tracking customers who abandoned the cart.

It also integrates with Klaviyo (read our Klaviyo review) to use the data from apps like CartHook to reach out to customers through personalized product recommendations. You can even leverage the Churn Buster integration to perform recovery campaigns.

If Google Analytics is your cup of tea, ReCharge Payments integrates with Little data that works with Google Analytics to conduct precise ecommerce tracking. You can also use One Click Upsell and Ultimate Upsell in the theme, notification or pop up section.

ReCharge Payments Review: Customer Support

Recharge payments - customer experience

ReCharge Payments provides an extensive knowledge base of video tutorials, blog content, case studies, events, experts and blog content.

Their preferred mode of support is email during weekdays. The team strives to offer support within 12 hours.

Recharge Payments Review: Drawbacks

There is no doubt that ReCharge Payments has great things to offer. However, like most apps, a few aspects could use some improvements.

While their customer support responds fast to issues, I wish they had a way to respond to issues during weekends or even after hours. After all, the best time to respond to a problem is right when it happens.

For precise inventory management, you might need to change the SKU after many orders. You may even feel the need to change the SKU between the first and second order. However, ReCharge Payments doesnโ€™t have built-in features to make this happen.

ReCharge Payments Review: Pricing

recharge payments pricing

ReCharge Payments has two pricing plans namely:

  • Standard

The standard plan is the ideal option for businesses with a monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of up to $100,000. ReCharge Payments charges a base rate fee of $39.99 every month plus 1% on all transactions. This amount doesnโ€™t include shipping and taxes.

It is important to remember that youโ€™ll also get charged an extra fee from payment processors like Braintree and Stripe. This usually costs 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

  • ReCharge Pro

Stores that qualify for the ReCharge Pro plan process over $100,000 in MRR. Its plan offers scalable pricing. In return, you get access to pro features, integrations, a custom checkout domain, and priority support.

Who Should Consider Using ReCharge Payments

The subscription economy has changed how customers make purchases. More people are shifting from pay-per-product to subscriptions.

Right now, businesses that excel at subscription are those that excel at emphasizing convenience, variety, and uniqueness.

ReCharge Payments is a terrific solution for anyone looking to kickstart their subscription business. It is also a great option if you want to increase the average lifetime value of your customers.

After all, some of the best things about ReCharge Payments is the customer retention feature that lets you know the reason people cancel subscriptions and goes further to try to win them back.

Even more importantly.ReCharge Payments also does its best to address a major challenge faced in the subscription industry (dunning!). It has great systems in place to counter this problem. This way, you get to be tough on being paid and still stand out as a brand that puts their customerโ€™s interest in mind.

Over To Youโ€ฆ

Do you have any experience using ReCharge Payments? Weโ€™d love to hear from you! Please share your thoughts in the comments section below. We love hearing from our readers and welcome a lively conversation.

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Belinda Kendi

Belinda Kendi is a talented content marketer, ghostwriter, and an e-commerce copywriter who produces relatable and valuable content that woo customers to subscribing. Why don't we start a conversation? Visit www.belindakendi.com or email me;[email protected].

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