Posts Tagged ‘credit cards’

What Does “Build Online Revenue” Mean Exactly?

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

For a few years, Vindicia’s tagline has been sitting a quiet sentry duty. People read it, but it seems to me to be something they absorb without thinking – like those photos with surprise objects in them that everyone looks past. I wanted to stop a moment, take a step back, and explain what Build Online Revenue really means.

First, there is a very tactical answer to that question. Vindicia, since inception and even before we launched CashBox in 2008, was about creating a platform to enable digital merchants to increase their revenues. CashBox extends customer lives while bringing tools and efficiency to our client’s marketing team tasked with expanding the paying freemium or subscriber base.  We do this with our SaaS solution in conjunction with industry best practices.

At my previous company, I personally experienced how hard it was to manage through channel conflict, as physical became digital, while simultaneously dealing with piracy. Delivering software services that delight and allowing business teams to experiment is an essential part of what Vindicia brings to life. We continue to build on the ability to leverage data, both a client’s and our entire network of 120 million accounts and 80 million unique credit cards, to help clients explore the non intuitive world that involves marketing digital services directly to end users.

But there is something larger that Build Online Revenue means. It is an attempt to capture a conviction. I cut my teeth in a world surrounded by pundits exclaiming, “everything is going to be free, man!” Even the wizened opined that the only way to build successful internet businesses were to capture as many users as fast as you possibly could, getting paid be damned.

I don’t believe that. I believe that the advertising model has its place, but it isn’t the way the great intellectual works of human history get created. The services that will be critical to us, that will move us, that will inspire us and allow us to create – they’re going to cost money because they are worth every penny – even more than their public price. Vindicia wants to be the mechanism through which the next wave of digital creation creates wealth.

Vindicia wants to help the entire world Build Online Revenue.

Gene HoffmanTags: , , , , , ,
Posted by Gene Hoffman in Best Practices, CEO Blog | No Comments »

Launching A Digital Business – Global Expansion

Monday, June 27th, 2011

The Internet knows no borders.  As a result, digital businesses have the opportunity to instantly generate a global customer base.  Successfully managing a global presence, however, involves a number of moving parts, all of which must work together in tandem for the business to truly thrive in international markets.

The fundamental question to ask is “What are the key aspects I should consider before launching a global digital service?”

  • Payment Method Support.  The demographics of your target audience, as well individual country characteristics, determine what payment methods merchants should support.  Online payment methods can include credit cards, debit cards, direct debit, mobile carrier billing, pre-paid cards, bank transfers, electronic check, PayPal, and even regional/country-specific payment methods like Boleto Bancario in Brazil.  Before you expand into a particular region, understand which payment methods are most relevant, so you know how to successfully reach—and bill—your audience.
  • Sales Tax. Different countries tax digital content and services at different rates, and your marketing, finance, and infrastructure teams need to be aware of this critical function.  Managing the requirements of different tax regimes is increasingly a crucial part of any digital business, especially as lawmakers try and understand the ramifications of failing to comply with digital goods taxation requirements.
  • Currency and Language Localization. Pricing in local currencies and communicating with customers in their native language aids in overall customer acquisition and retention.  Though supporting this “localized” presence increases your operating costs, doing so should result in higher returns.
  • Regulations. Each country and/or region has its own set of regulations designed to protect consumers from exposure of their personal and/or financial information.  Whether these regulations are the European Data Privacy laws, PCI, or other requirements, ensure both your infrastructure and your company culture support the requisite privacy and security policies in your target markets.

By addressing the aspects explained in the above list, you are preparing your digital business to expand globally and take the world by storm.

Sanjay SarathyTags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sanjay Sarathy in Best Practices, Marketing Fury, Payments 101.201.301 | 1 Comment »

Rapid Growth and Even More Rapid Innovation

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

The good news is that we’re growing far faster than we anticipated and, for that, we have to thank our various clients, some of whom never heard the word recession. The better news is that we are introducing a whole set of product innovations that we believe will enable merchants selling digital content to even more rapidly generate benefits from SaaS billing.

Our latest release, announced today, is the first in a series that focuses on bringing the power of customer acquisition and retention to the “post-pay” world. What do we mean by that? A “pre-pay” model is one in which a customer pays in advance of the service being used or consumed. Vindicia CashBox has traditionally focused on this model and the markets that adopt it. The marketing and billing processes in a pre-pay model typically orient around “automatic payment” methods — credit cards, debit cards, pre-paid cards, and others. Conversely, a “post-pay” model is one in which customers pay after the service has been used. Businesses presenting invoices have often (though not always) fallen into the post-pay world.

The reality is that most companies dealing with invoicing have traditionally focused on automating the order-to-cash process, and specifically on minimizing days-sales-outstanding (DSO). That is absolutely a noteworthy pursuit and one that CashBox natively supports, but frankly misses the bigger picture around customer retention. After all, the benefit of reducing DSO by 10% can be completely offset by your customer retention % falling as well, and this effect is magnified if you are a subscription business.

We focus a lot of our time and effort in understanding how to optimize your customer retention efforts, independent of what business model your online service supports. It’s also why we can state unequivocally that we added more than $50 million to our clients’ top line in 2010. We look forward to reaching that $100 million mark soon.

Scale is another critical aspect of the billing process and one that Vindicia has focused on from our inception. We understand what it means to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, support billing in various currencies across different payment methods, calculate necessary taxes across different global tax regimes, and communicating with end-users in their language of choice.

Whether your billing model supports subscriptions or microtransactions, invoices or automatic payments or both, or credit cards or electronic checks, you can be assured that CashBox will focus on optimizing your acquisition and retention efforts across a highly scalable SaaS billing infrastructure.

Sanjay SarathyTags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sanjay Sarathy in Best Practices, Vindicia Press Release | No Comments »

The Light is Green, The Trap is Clean

Monday, April 25th, 2011

We have a new toy in the Vindicia office. It is a high-Oersted degausser. Why might we need such a thing?  It’s part of taking our responsibility for customer data seriously.

The industry best practice for securely erasing a hard drive is to enforce seven or more passes of non-sensitive data written to that hard drive. However, when you run a SaaS billing infrastructure at scale you will have drive failures that are destructive enough that no operating system can write to those drives. Any hard drive we control that has the potential to have a credit card number (encrypted or not) or a portion of a private cryptography key has to at least have had “true secure deletion” performed on it. In these instances when we can’t perform those writes, our degausser performs the necessary task.

However, being the appropriately paranoid custodians of more than 50 million credit cards we sent a test drive that had never had sensitive data out to a forensic data recover service. We just received confirmation that no data was retrievable.

The bonus is that the degausser makes a satisfying sound reminiscent of the “Ecto Containment Unit” in the classic movie Ghostbusters, even including the green light when it’s time to remove the hard drive from its drawer.

Brett ThomasTags: , , , ,
Posted by Brett Thomas in Best Practices, Industry News | No Comments »

Now Announcing … “Refunds”??

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Building business-critical software is an interesting process. We must understand the core requirements of our prospects and clients, find which additional features will serve the largest number of clients, and predict future requirements. However, no matter how good you are at this process, no software package will meet 100% of every client’s needs. A good sales team must make certain that prospective clients understand where any gaps may lie, and an effective services team must be creative in proposing workable solutions to close those gaps. At the end of the day, however, you must have a product that services the vast majority of feature/function requirements as defined by your market.

I recently saw this announcement from one of our competitors:

http://blog.zuora.com/zblog/2010/06/zuoras-june-10-release-major-new-functionality-allows-zcustomers-to-accurately-track-payment-operati.html

I’m not sure how the services team at Zuora has been working around this for so long.  Refunds are a basic part of being able to accept credit card payments.  But I have to congratulate them on working around such a gap.

It does beg the question: what else are they working around?

Doug SmithTags: , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Client Services | No Comments »
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