Conquering In-app Subscription Management: A Guide for Subscription Businesses

In-app purchases have revolutionized the mobile app landscape, offering businesses and users a win-win. For businesses, it’s a powerful growth engine, unlocking new revenue streams, boosting user engagement, and enabling monetization of free apps. On the other hand, users enjoy personalized experiences and have quick access to products and services.

The mobile app ecosystem is booming, hitting $133 billion in global consumer spending in 2021. Projections forecast this to rise to $270 billion by 2025, with 77% of the revenue coming from in-app purchases, underscoring the ascent of mobile subscriptions.

Yet, with the rise of in-app purchases comes a new challenge. Companies must ensure a seamless user experience while integrating this additional channel into their operations. In this blog, we’ll delve into the challenges posed by mobile subscriptions, explore a real-life use case, and provide insights on overcoming these hurdles.

Key Challenges of integrating in-app purchases into your business:

Siloed Revenue Data: Tracking cross-channel revenue becomes a financial challenge, as data is siloed across the App Store, Play Store, and Web, making it impossible to grasp your true financial performance and access the overall health of your business.

Recognition of Revenues: Recognizing revenues from various app stores and payment gateways is complex. This complexity affects financial accuracy, compliance, and the ability to track the true health of the business. 

Heavy R&D and maintenance costs: Keeping up with the ever-changing guidelines of the App Store and Play Store can feel like a relentless burden. It is an inefficient use of your time and drains resources that could be better spent on innovation and faster development cycles.

Take OneStream Live, a company embracing a mobile-first vision with an ever-increasing user base on iOS and Android apps. Web subscriptions lived on Stripe and PayPal, while mobile resided in Apple and Google in-app purchases. This multi-platform setup, while initially manageable, quickly spiraled into a nightmare of:

Restricted real-time subscription information: The real-time subscription status of customers is not easily accessible within the App Store and Play Store. This limited access to information adds complexity when resolving customer queries.

Endless customer support: Billing issues, refunds, and discounts plagued support inboxes, stemming from data inconsistency across different systems.

Month-end mayhem: Manually merging revenue data from various platforms every month became a tedious, error-prone ritual.

Blindfolded decision-making: Lack of unified insights across web and mobile subscriptions hampered the ability to understand and optimize growth.

How OneStream Live went from scattered chaos to unified clarity with Chargebee

Recognizing the need for a comprehensive solution, OneStream Live chose Chargebee to redefine its in-app subscription management. Chargebee became the single source of truth for all subscriptions, seamlessly integrating with Stripe, PayPal, Apple App Store, and Google Play Store. Chargebee also offers a backend and wrapper around Apple’s StoreKit and Google Play Billing to make implementing in-app purchases and subscriptions easy. Now, there is no more data fragmentation, just one clear picture.

Chargebee also automatically handles all in-app subscription changes, frees up your team for more strategic tasks, and keeps you up-to-date on platform policy changes.

OneStream Live now has a consolidated perspective on its web and mobile subscriptions, thanks to Chargebee’s comprehensive reports and dashboards. This real-time access to accurate metrics such as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and churn empowers them to make informed decisions and drive their business forward.

With Chargebee by their side, OneStream Live stepped out of the data chaos and into a world of clarity, streamlined operations, and data-driven growth. Their customer-facing teams now have instant access to critical information and can focus on enhancing activation rates and feature adoption.

Ready to transform your subscription management? Explore Chargebee today to help with in-app subscription management and unlock efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.