How FastSpring Drives SaaS Growth: Q4 Product Updates

Braden Steel
Braden Steel • Senior Product Marketing Manager
November 22nd, 2022
Estimated read time: 4 minutes, 33 seconds

Since 2020, growth in the SaaS market has increased dramatically and is expected to grow over 27% a year. Three key trends driving this growth include: 

  • Subscription model innovation: Customizable subscription models make it easier for SaaS companies to optimize their pricing and billing. 
  • Integration of PLG and sales-led business models: Supporting multiple GTM strategies has become the standard for SaaS.  
  • Localization: More and more SaaS companies offer localized buying and in-app experiences.

SaaS is evolving so quickly, it’s difficult for even well-established companies to keep up with prospects’ and customers’ rapidly changing expectations.

This is why more and more SaaS companies are seeking out merchant-of-record solutions like FastSpring to simplify their payment stack and reduce the risk and complexity of transacting around the world.

As the leading merchant of record for SaaS and subscription software businesses, FastSpring provides one solution for global payments, tax, pricing, and subscription management. And we are continuing to evolve our platform to keep up with industry trends like those above. We recently released new features that will support the global growth of SaaS companies using FastSpring.

“FastSpring has built its reputation of being the most robust merchant of record solution on the market,” explained Kurt Smith, FastSpring’s Chief Product Officer. “We uphold that reputation by empowering fast-growing SaaS and software companies to stay focused on building their product while leaving everything else to FastSpring. From pricing to payments, billing, tax management, and more.”

Below you’ll find details about what’s new in our platform.

New Reporting Suite

Using FastSpring’s new reporting suite leverages our position as your merchant of record to deliver a holistic view of your products through subscription analytics and revenue impact — all in one place. 

Revenue and Subscription Dashboards

With FastSpring’s revenue reporting, users can do a deep dive into revenue by individual product, check refund rates, view transactions by region, and much more. The subscription dashboard allows you to drill down into MRR, customer lifetime value, churn rates, and beyond. Combined, the dashboards provide all the critical reporting components needed to drive revenue and profits. And they’re just the beginning. We’re in the process of developing additional reporting dashboards to support the varied use cases of our users.

Data API

Using our new data API, users can programmatically extract their data from the FastSpring platform and analyze it within their preferred BI tools. Users can query their sales and subscription data via REST or GraphQL API in addition to webhooks and/or large data exports. 

Benefits of FastSpring Reporting and Analytics include:

  • Single source of truth — Take away the complexity of reporting back to key stakeholders. We consolidate everything into an easy-to-understand dashboard directly inside the FastSpring platform so you can spend less time moving data, and more time analyzing it.
  • Dig into personalized insights — FastSpring reporting shows you the information that matters most to you. With persistent filters, know that you’re reviewing the data with the highest impact on your day-to-day.
  • Easily export data for advanced analysis — Getting data from your payments, subscriptions, and product systems can be time-consuming and prone to errors. FastSpring’s holistic merchant of record model ensures that not only is your data in a single place, but it also is easily exported for more advanced data analysis.
  • Revenue management – With FastSpring’s reporting capabilities, you can monitor and manage your revenue trends to drive key business decisions.

New Embedded Checkout

FastSpring enables SaaS and software companies to set up and maintain a web storefront with significantly fewer internal resources and less risk.

Benefits include:

  • All-in-one payment solution — FastSpring’s self-service checkout is integrated into our core platform, which also includes subscription management, a customer account platform, B2B digital invoicing tools, and so much more.
  • Global payment compliance — FastSpring maintains payment compliance standards for all transactions, such as PCI-DSS, PSD2, and other regional compliance standards.
  • Automated localization — Automatically take preferred payment methods and regional currencies.
  • Sales tax, VAT, and GST management —  FastSpring automatically calculates, collects, and remits consumption taxes on your behalf.
  • Advanced customization — Using our robust JavaScript library, webhooks, and REST API, users can customize FastSpring’s checkout and web storefront in countless ways.

FastSpring now supports three checkout options our customers can use on their websites — each with different best use cases and benefits.

Our newest experience, embedded checkout, removes friction in the checkout process by allowing software businesses to embed a storefront directly into the places where customers are most likely to make a purchase.

It also provides advanced customization of the purchasing experience through CSS overrides to better suit the company’s brand, eliminating the need for redirects or overlays.

  • More advanced customization and flexibility — With embedded checkout, companies can further take advantage of the ability to customize the experience with CSS overrides and deliver the exceptional brand experience their customers expect. 
  • A seamless checkout experience  With Embedded Checkout, remove disruption in the buyer journey and increase the likelihood of converting.

More Feature Releases

With our new free trials without payment capability, SaaS companies can offer their prospects the option to sign up for a free trial experience without entering a payment method. This option is known to increase trial sign-ups and drive new customer acquisition.
B2B ACH payments allow companies to process ACH payments with a single click empowering SaaS companies to support B2B quoting processes and consumer sales.

Braden Steel

Braden Steel

Braden is the Senior Product Marketing Manager for FastSpring. When he's not bringing new products to market, he spends his time writing fantasy novels.

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