Knowledge Base: How does Chargify compare to Authorize.net ARB?

Authorize.net, a long-time provider of online merchant services, has an add-on service known as Auto Recurring Billing (ARB). If you already use Authorize.net as your payment gateway, you can sign up for ARB in addition to your standard gateway services. It costs an additional $10 per month and does not incur any additional transactions fees.

Though ARB provides a convenient method for businesses to bill on a recurring basis, the tools are rudimentary at best. The functionality is essentially bolted onto their existing gateway service and provides only a couple of basic abilities: offer free trials and bill customer x on day x of every month.

Chargify addresses the shortcomings of ARB in a few different ways.

Hosted Payment Pages

Chargify gives you two options for collecting payments from your customers. You can integrate our RESTful API and collect subscriptions from your sites’ own checkout page, or use what we call a hosted payment page. This is a secure checkout page that resides on Chargify’s servers and allows you to collect payments without using our API. Simply link your customers to the hosted signup page and the rest is easy. Our sign up pages are designed using best practices learned over the last six years doing recurring billing. We’ve built pages that optimize your checkout conversions and make your customers feel secure when signing up for your service.

Your hosted page communicates directly with your Chargify account and your new customers’ subscription information is updated, real-time. You have the ability to customize the branding on your sign up page or stay generic. It’s up to you.
Authorize.net ARB does allow for API integration, but does not give merchants a hosted sign up option. If not using the API, merchants are forced to manually enter in new subscriptions. This leaves a lot of room for human error.

Creating Subscriptions

When setting up new subscriptions in ARB, you’ve got a couple of simple options to customize. You have the ability to define subscription intervals, subscription duration, and whether or not you’d like to offer a free trial period.

Chargify takes this functionality a few steps further. You can control all the variables listed above with added benefits. We’ve built in the ability to charge a one-time setup fee that occurs when your users initally sign up. In addition, many SaaS and Web 2.0 companies have premium services that they offer as add-ons. Chargify allows you to create an unlimited number of add-ons, so that at checkout, your customers can opt-into additional services. Examples we’re seeing are merchants giving customers the option to add more storage space, get better security, or opt for a higher level of support.

Business Intelligence & Reports

We think billing is a cornerstone of any SaaS or Web 2.0 application. That’s why we built Chargify to provide merchants with all sorts of useful reporting and business intelligence tools. Powerful charting tools show how you’re performing over time. Curious about how your current and potential customers reacted to a promotion or marketing campaign? Use Chargify to track trends in sign ups, cancellations, and get real-time insight into how you’re app is performing. Chargify’s reporting capabilities are designed to give you, the merchant, the tools to make informed business decisions.

ARB does a great a job of pushing transactions through their gateway. But, it doesn’t have ANY of the reporting tools to help you make better decisions about your business. You get the ability to automatically charge every month, that’s it.

Appending, Pro-rating, Grandfathering

Chargify gives you powerful tools to make adjustments to your customers’ subscription information on the fly. If you want to try out a new subscription mix on your site, Chargify will automatically grandfather in customers on old plans. Chargify automatically calculates pro-ration should a customer decide to cancel and you can add opt-in services to a subscription at any time. It is all handled automatically, saving you time.

Dunning & Email Notifications

After billing millions of transactions for Grasshopper.com, we learned that the most important part of the billing process is what happens when cards don’t process correctly. We call this the “unhappy path.”

Chargify gives you the ability to do a few different proactive things to deal with failed cards. First and foremost, Chargify automatically contacts customers whose cards are about to expire. This is a great way to retain customers long term.

What about when a card fails? There are many reasons why credit cards fail and Chargify is set up to handle all of them.
You can customize e-mail notifications so that in the event of a charge failure, Chargify automatically contacts your customers with pre-determined messaging. Not only is this a huge time-saver for merchants, it is a billing best practice that helps you retain customers longer. You have complete control over how your customers get contacted and you can greatly reduce the number of lapsed subscriptions with this tool.

Authorize.net ARB gives you the power to receive e-mail alerts. But they only go the account administrator! This means that you, the merchant, has to deal with each credit card issue individually. It’s up to you to investigate credit card errors and manually try and resolve them.

Global Currency Support

Chargify, during its beta period, is using Authorize.net as our primary payment gateway. This means that we only allow our beta merchants to charge their customers in U.S. dollars. This is going to change very soon.

We’re adding support for a number of international gateways so you can do business all over the world. From Day 1, we built Chargify with this in mind.