Chargebee Fall 2020 Product Updates: Accelerate Your Time to Market

Of course, we’ve all seen motivational posters that say “Change is the Only Constant”.

But, boy did 2020 put a wringer through that! 

As scaling businesses, we’ve all had our agility and nimbleness pushed to the limits. And I’m not even talking about the work-from-home and the 24X7 snacking…

I’m talking about how in just the last few months, companies have accelerated their digitization efforts by three to four years. 

But we’ve noticed one common question that has driven businesses to sniff out opportunity in this chaos, and move overnight to capture it:

“What does this Change Make Possible”

Pret A Manger, the UK based sandwich super-chain, saw a massive drop in footfalls in the months following the global lockdown. In September this year, Pret launched a coffee subscription offering that’s been an industry game-changer. 

Yousign, the European e-signature giant noticed that the whole pandemic situation opened a massive market opportunity amongst notaries. Over the next two months, they launched a plan targeted to this segment that now contributes over 20% of their MRR.

Superfoods Company, one of the top-selling online effervescent tablet companies globally, saw its revenue increase by 4X in less than a year. They expanded their product line from one to five products and their subscriber base to over 200,000.

In fact, today it takes Paul Kapsner at Superfoods Company, roughly 30 minutes to decide on a pricing level and launch a new product. “With Chargebee we’re now allowed to make mistakes. And then fix them right away.”

What’s common among all these businesses? Sure, they use Chargebee to manage their subscription and billing workflows. But more important, they noticed an opportunity and shifted all their guns to seize it. 

Over the last few updates, we’ve rethought Chargebee to give you end-to-end visibility into your revenue operations. We’ve worked to remove friction from your Product-Led workflows, and add elegance to your Quote-to-Cash process. We’ve made it infinitely easier to enforce contract terms, and automate deal flows. We’ve worked to help your revenue process stay agile, even as your business grows in scale and sophistication. I guess the last one’s an occupational hazard of working with customers like you whose growth curve looks like a hockey stick on steroids!

So with this Product Release lineup, our objectives were a lot simpler: To help you spend less time in boardroom debates, by accelerating your time to market.

So confidently evaluate new market segments and geographies, launching products, redefine your sales model, experiment with pricing, roll smart discounts, deliver an exceptional customer experience and retain every dollar and user longer with the Fall 2020 product updates!

The Fall 2020 Updates 

Support Mobile-first Subscriptions with Native SDKs

What: Native iOS & Android SDKs and Reactive Native Wrappers to launch mobile-ready subscription offerings in minutes. 

Why: Driving subscriptions using your mobile applications should not be a distinct afterthought. Use the Chargebee Native Android / iOS SDKs to create a delightful checkout and subscription experience via your mobile apps. You can use the React Native Wrapper to host web pages within the mobile app so that your users don’t have to move between the app and browser to complete a transaction.

Launch your mobile-first subscription solution after you read this.

Manage Inventories at Scale with Product Catalog 2.0

What: A super-efficient way to organize multiple products, plans, add-ons, currencies, and billing frequencies under one roof.

Why: Moving into newer markets or experimenting with pricing is challenging for most companies without an effective way to catalog all the pricing elements. With the Chargebee Product Catalog 2.0 – you can manage your inventory at scale and execute changes in a matter of minutes. 

Do write to beta@chargebee.com if you’d like to try the new product catalog.

[Limited Beta] Charge Customers Equitably with Usage-based Billing

What: Bill customers based on actual usage, on schedule and automatically, without any manual intervention. 

Why: Implementing a fair billing policy requires regular collection of usage data, applying pricing calculations, and charging customers accordingly. Automate the whole shebang with Chargebee. So, while you do what’s best for your customers, you are not stressed about manual execution.

Learn how you can automate usage-based billing here. 

Bill Accurately With Multi-Decimal Support

What: Improve accuracy of your usage, charges, and tax calculations with Multi-Decimal Support

Why: A cent here, a cent there, and rounding errors can turn into an operational nightmare at scale. With support for upto 20 decimal places, you can now accurately reflect taxes and charges in your invoices. This granularity applies to your discounts and add-ons as well.

Check out how Chargebee enables multi-decimal support in your revenue operations.

Reduce Manual Efforts with Chargebacks Management

What: Automated workflows to handle payment disputes with zero touch.

Why: Chargebacks are bad enough. They shouldn’t also suck your time and effort. They only increase with your growth, and handling them manually, is no way to scale! Use Chargebee to automate changes to subscriptions, issue credit notes, update customer records, and make the entire process transparent with your customers.

Get manual chargeback workflows out of your way. Reclaim your time.

Support Larger Customers with Offline Checkout 

What: Use offline payment methods to close high-value deals without adding manual overhead

Why: Processing non-card payments should not be extra hard. Let Chargebee do the heavy-lifting for you and ensure that when customers request offline payments, relevant instructions and invoices are handled automatically, and as smoothly as a credit card transaction. Say hello to more customers with automations to handle offline payments.

Automate your offline payment workflows today!

Get Deeper Insights with Custom Reports

What: Create custom reports based on any data field within Chargebee

Why: You should be able build reports the way you want, about the metrics you care about, without developer dependency or data export work. Oh, and you can surface reports to anyone in your organization on a scheduled basis or have alerts notify you when a metric crosses acceptable thresholds.

Learn all about building your own custom reports!

Recognize Revenue Uniquely with Flexible MRR Calculations

What: Choose which recurring and non-recurring charges need to be computed as a part of your MRR

Why: SaaS businesses use the MRR value to determine the company’s health status and expected growth. But when certain one-time components such as implementation fees make a significant difference to the earned revenue of the business, it is imperative that we let you choose how you want to include these components in your recurring revenue calculations. Now you have that choice.

Learn how to enable flexibility in revenue calculations for your account.

Get Email Delivery Updates with Transaction Status 

What: Get to know if your emails are read by your customers or not.

Why: You use Chargebee to send important emails regarding payment confirmation, invoices, dunning, etc. But not knowing whether users received or read the communication can be confusing. So, now Chargebee shares the delivery status of emails to help you determine the next course of action.

Learn how you can use Chargebee Email Notifications

Schedule Future Renewals with Advance Invoices

What: Send renewal reminders and raise future invoices at a preset frequency with zero manual intervention. 

Why: You want to be able to charge your customers from a certain point in the future. You also want to start your renewal negotiations well in advance and not leave it till the last minute. Use Chargebee to schedule invoices in advance so that you aren’t dependent on Google Reminders to get work done. 

Make your work a little easier by scheduling your invoices in advance.

Enforce Contract Terms Automatically with Salesforce-Chargebee Integration

What: Create quotes from within Salesforce for your upgrades, one-off charges and enforce these contract terms using Chargebee

Why: Renewals, Upgrades, Downgrades, One-time Implementations all cause a heavy toll on the revenue engine because of multiple redundancies and manual overheads. Suddenly everyone is working on the same thing, and your carefully built-up efficiency goes for a toss. Imagine being able to create a quote for renewal or one-time charge via your Salesforce account and see it getting enforced automatically and reflected in all your customer records downstream. That is what is possible with the enhanced Salesforce-Chargebee integration.

Use the enhanced Quote-To-Cash workflow of the Salesforce-Chargebee integration.

Scale Globally with Broader Payment Methods

What: Expand the number of ways your customers can pay you with more bank payment methods and digital wallets

Why: With the addition of Giropay and Dotpay to your checkout flow, you can serve even more customers in Germany and Poland. You can make it even more seamless for your customers by using digital wallets such as Google Pay. The broader your payment methods, the more global your reach. 

Read about the Chargebee supported digital wallets and bank payment methods.

Talk to us today to see how your organization can challenge the status quo and scale confidently.