How to Automate Recurring Billing in Authorize.net

As subscription enterprises scale up, the importance of having an integrated platform for the management of subscriptions, automation of billing tasks, and seamless processing of payments becomes increasingly apparent. In many ways, your bottom line depends on how well this infrastructure is set up for smooth and frictionless recurring billing. In this article, we discuss how to automate recurring billing in Authorize.net and what your business stands to gain from integrating this payment gateway into your subscription management system for improved operational efficiency and revenue expansion.

What Does Authorize.net Do?

Authorize.net is a payment gateway service that allows businesses to securely process electronic payments online. It provides businesses with the infrastructure needed to handle online transaction processes, from verifying payment details to transferring funds into the merchant’s account.

When a purchase is made through a website or a hosted payment page (HPP) powered with Authorize.net, the customer’s payment details are securely transmitted to the Authorize.net server for processing. Authorize.net then communicates with the payment processor and the customer’s bank to verify that the payment is legitimate and that the funds are available. If the payment is approved, Authorize.net sends a confirmation message back to both the customer and the merchant to inform them that the transaction is completed.

Beyond operating as a secure payment gateway to enable online transactions, Authorize.net also offers a range of other features, such as fraud detection and prevention tools and recurring billing options. This allows businesses to tailor their payment processing flow to meet their specific needs and to provide a seamless payment experience for their customers.

The Automated Recurring Billing™ (ARB) features

Authorize.net automated recurring payments allow automation against a recurring schedule based on your business model, management of trials, and acceptance of multiple payment methods. This improves billing security and efficiency by eliminating the need to manually re-enter and authorize payment information for every repeat transaction.

The Benefits of Automate Recurring Billing in Authorize.net in SubscriptionFlow

Integrating Authorize.net with subscription management software can provide several benefits for businesses that offer subscription-based services. The following are some of the ways this integration can help streamline operational flow to maximize revenue generation:

1. Automation of the Billing Process

With Authorize.net integrated into the subscription management software, businesses can automate their entire billing process for subscribers to optimize the customer payments journey. This ensures timely and accurate billing and reduces the risk of human error, involuntary churn, revenue leakage, and customer dissatisfaction caused by missed or late payments and invoicing.

Read More: How Much Is Manual Billing Costing Your Subscription Business?

2. Customization in Billing Plans

Authorize.net allows businesses to customize billing plans for their subscribers. This means they can offer different pricing tiers for startups, SMEs, and large enterprises, multiple billing models, such as weekly, monthly, and annual cycles, and other options to meet the needs of their customer base. Flexibility in billing and payment configurations prevents the slipping of customers outside the sales funnel due to rigid and unadaptable billing models. This allows your business to truly maximize customer acquisition and business growth KPIs.

3. Secure Payment Processing

Highly secure online transactions are the bedrock of your business’s reputation and growth potential with no room for compromise in this space. Integration of Authorize.net with your subscription and recurring billing management software provides secure data transmission, tokenization, fraud detection services, PCI DSS compliance, and two-factor authentication.

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All these safety features allow businesses utilizing Authorize.net with subscription management tools, to offer their customers a safe and reliable payment experience building trust and increasing customer satisfaction.

4. Centralized and Simplified Management

Through this integration with Authorize.net, businesses can manage their subscribers and payments from a single unified and streamlined platform. This reduces the risk of errors and simplifies the management process, reduces administrative burden, and provides a better customer experience.

5. Automation of Proration

On its own Authorize.net does not offer proration automation for customers switching plans in the middle of a billing cycle. This means your business would need to engage in a long process of manual calculations every time a new subscriber joins in the middle of the billing period. As your business scales, the potential for error with manual proration does as well.

By integrating Authorize.net with subscription management software you can easily automate proration so that when a subscriber upgrades or downgrades their plan they are automatically charged exactly what they owe, not more leading to loss of trust or less leading to revenue leakage. Having the combined powers of Authorize.net and SubscriptionFlow on your side, this can be automated with ease.

Read More: What is Prorated Subscription Billing?

6. Improvement in customer experience 

Through this integration, businesses can offer their customers more convenient payment options, including automated payments and online account management through customer self-service pages where they can upgrade/downgrade, suspend or cancel their subscription. Empowering your customer to exercise round-the-clock control over their subscription without needing to contact support, allows you to dramatically enhance the overall customer subscription journey and increase customer loyalty. This is sure to have a positive impact on customer and revenue retention.

7. Insights and reporting 

In addition to the billing automation services, subscription management hubs also provide businesses with detailed reports on subscription activity for business analytics. This includes close monitoring of churn rates and revenue growth. After all, what gets measured, gets managed!

In this way, integrating with Authorize.net can help businesses gain even more insights into their payment space and customer behavior in the customer payments journey.

In this way, billing process automation facilitated by Authorize.net allows you to provide your subscribers with a frictionless, secure, and seamless purchase experience, all integrated into one clean, intuitive subscription management software. A kink-free payments journey is sure to drive up customer and revenue retention, which drives customer acquisition and scalable growth for your subscription business in the long run.