Avangate announces Fall 14 release of digital commerce solution for the new services economy

With this Fall ‘14 release of the Avangate Commerce Solution, the company is addressing the challenges faced by service providers and start-ups that need to go beyond traditional payment providers and point transaction solutions.

A new consumer survey commissioned by Avangate points to the rising customer demand for longer-term relationships specifically with these new service providers and the failure of point transactional payments systems to support them.

According to the survey, 46% of consumers refuse to purchase online subscriptions without a freemium option whereas 60% of consumers have set up at least 1-2 recurring payments. Moreover, 45% of consumers prefer to compare 3-4 different online channels before making a purchase decision. Nearly 40% of consumers prefer to pay bills online and around 99% do not use Bitcoin (the 1% who do, almost half wouldn’t use it as their primary payment method).

The current Avangate Commerce Solution includes features designed to help companies move beyond the payment transaction and increase long-term customer revenue and retention.

Among others, there are the Revenue Recovery Tools (RRT), which is an add-on that improves conversion and retention for recurring revenues lost due to passive churn and limitations of working with a limited set of processors, an area traditionally reserved for only the largest of merchants, and the Growth Edition, a new package designed for both start-ups and innovative divisions of larger companies seeking an alternative to traditional payment providers as they launch and grow new recurring revenue streams.

There is also the Get to Market Faster with Your Branded Customer Experience feature whose focus is on expanded developer tools (REST-based APIs, testing/ log monitoring/ commerce lifecycle management tools), advanced customization of customer portals and partner portals, self-service testing suite and salesforce.com Adapter+. Simplify and Scale Your Recurring Revenue Business, which is another feature aiming to provide extended recurring and currency support for Purchase Order automation.

There is also infrastructure optimization with distributed architecture decreasing loading times by over 15%, expanded outsourced operations and automation for financial reconciliation, chargeback and processor management, refund handling and compliance updates.

Eventually, there is the Increase Conversion, Sell More feature which highlights expanded recurring global payments (SEPA EU Direct Debit for France, Spain, Belgium) and enhanced marketing tools with upselling, lead and dunning management, Google Analytics integration, affiliate segmentation, and reporting

Avangate is a digital commerce provider that enables the New Services Economy, helping software, cloud and online services companies sell their products and services via any channel, acquire customers across touchpoints, increase retention, leverage smarter payments, experiment on the fly and optimize their business in order to increase overall revenue. Avangate’s clients include Absolute Software, Bitdefender, Brocade, FICO, HP Software, Kaspersky, Metaio and many more companies across the globe.