Challenging the Status Quo: Web Shop Manager Improved Their Productivity by 50% Using Chargebee, Compared to Zuora

Web Shop Manager was founded on the principles of enabling a traditional business model scale on the Internet. For automotive aftermarket part companies that follow the eCommerce model, Web Shop Manager offers a wide range of services — from offering professional services in terms of strategy to designing and developing their website, building complex product catalogs, and offering sophisticated product data analytics.

Or in their own words, they “help car guys sell more parts!”

Building a lifelong partnership and strong customer success with this niche segment is why they boast a customer retention rate of a whopping 99%.

The Problem

With a combination of contract-based sales, recurring pricing for the monthly subscriptions, and usage-based charges, Web Shop Manager wanted to start onboarding customers on a self-serve model, eliminating some of the manual processes. However, the sales team felt that their previous CRM, Salesforce, was not equipped to handle product-led onboarding. This prompted a migration to HubSpot.

What followed was a series of issues with their then-billing system, Zuora and HubSpot — starting with the lack of native integration with two-way sync. The need for a native integration between their CRM and billing system became pertinent.

They found themselves ‘jumping through hoops’ for something as simple as setting up subscriptions, or one-time charges, thus prompting the need to look for alternatives.

The Solution

After an unsuccessful shopping experience with Chargify wherein they found the sales process impersonal and a native integration with HubSpot was absent, Web Shop Manager found a refreshing experience with Chargebee. According to Joe, “Chargebee’s sales team did a good job with keeping us in the loop, onboarding, and everything else that was needed to keep us interested, outside of just being sold well on the demos.”A more important reason was Chargebee’s integration with HubSpot which allowed the sales and marketing teams to get a transparent view of their prospects and customers inside their CRM.

The Pay-off

• Ease of set up: Chargebee’s personalized hand-holding process along with the intuitive UI helped them get on board with Chargebee and start charging their customers in 15% of the time (2 months) that it took to get into Zuora (1 year).

• Contextual sales with Chargebee and HubSpot: That two-way sync between HubSpot and Chargebee to improve their automation helps their sales team sell effectively. According to their sales team, "One of the reasons we wanted a new billing system was for the syncing of our client account information within HubSpot to provide better transparency for the sales and marketing teams, based on our customer base and info."

• Automated self-serve onboarding: Now, the team gets notified about a sign-up from HubSpot, following which they create a customer in Chargebee, and send the contract with a payment link. Then the subscription lifecycle for that customer to pay the recurring monthly technology license begins. The team will be automating this process further with Chargebee to cater to SMB segments and eliminate any manual process.

• Flexible pricing: Web Shop Manager is now able to add one-time charges or add-ons on demand, adjust the pricing based on usage-based billing for aspects such as professional consultation, and the monthly recurring payments are on autopilot.

• Real-time Notifications with Slack: Chargebee’s integration with Slack has given the team greater clarity on customer details with notifications on activations, invoices, payments received, etc.

• Payment Recovery and Automated Event-Based Communication: Dunning saved time and effort for Joe from constantly calling and following up with customers on matters of payment. The automated email notifications from invoice generation, requesting an updated payment method, and payment reminders took a lot from Joe’s plate and allowed him to focus on more important aspects of the company.

Everyday stuff has been very solid with Chargebee. I'll go into Chargebee and see, what subscriptions got paid? What subscriptions might be ending? Who has to update their payment method? Whose credit card is going to expire? What emails went out that day and the email history between customers and us? There's an easy way to filter all that out through the customer link. And Chargebee has helped me greatly in transparently showing the status of my customers contextually.

Joseph Dulo, Finance Controller, Web Shop Manager