Avangate Announces Fall ’14 Release Of The Only Digital Commerce Solution Designed For The New Services Economy

New Survey Research Highlights the Need for Companies to Redefine Commerce Beyond Point Transactions; New Features Go Beyond Payments and Deepen Long-Term Customer Relationships

Redwood City, CA - November 04, 2014 - Avangate, the leading Digital Commerce solution provider trusted by thousands of Software, Cloud, and Online Services companies to grow their business worldwide, today announced more than 200 new features to the Company's Commerce Solution for Service Providers to launch and grow online revenue streams, rapidly at global scale. With this Fall '14 release of the Avangate Commerce Solution, the company is addressing the challenges of Service Providers and start-ups that need to go beyond traditional payment providers and point transaction solutions.

"Today, we are seeing the digitization of products into services -- what we are calling the 'New Services Economy' -- and it's spawning the next generation of Software and Online Services companies that are redefining commerce. For these new Service Providers and vendors, the ability to truly monetize their offerings is no longer about point payment transactions with the customer, but rather being able to interact, service and expand the relationship with the customer from the discovery, trial, and add-on and retention phases - all of which are potential opportunities to make purchasing decisions. Our focus has been about serving these innovators who are launching new products or services and looking to build long-term customer lifetime value and recurring revenue streams," said Carl Theobald, CEO at Avangate.

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.

Some of the key findings include:

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

An infographic of the complete results can be found here via this link.

"At Movavi, we pay careful attention to customer lifetime value, especially the metrics around renewal rates for subscriptions," said Albina Zakharenko, Head of Marketing and Sales at Movavi."Avangate's Commerce solution provides us with clear visibility into key business metrics around authorizations and renewals and with a tool to recover a significant portion of our revenues, which otherwise would have been lost."

"In this New Services Economy, companies need to be able to rapidly create new products and service offerings, offer new subscription, freemium or usage models, and do so in weeks, not months. Service Providers are required to rethink their packaging and pricing for conversion; how to enable their website, call center, resellers, as well as connected devices to service, retain and upsell their customers. Our latest release of the Avangate Commerce Solution arms Software and Online Services companies with over 200 new enhancements to get to market faster across any customer touch point, to move to recurring revenue models easily, and to sell more, globally," said Michael Ni, CMO/SVP of Marketing and Products at Avangate.

The Fall '14 release of the Avangate Commerce Solution includes features designed to help companies move beyond the payment transaction and increase long-term customer revenue and retention.

Two additions to Avangate's solutions line-up include:

• Revenue Recovery Tools (RRT): An add-on that improves conversion and retention for recurring revenues lost due to passive churn and limitations of working with just a limited set of processors, an area traditionally reserved for only the largest of merchants - but now available to companies of all sizes. RRT brings together extended credit account updaters, retry logic, gateway failure/ intelligent payment routing, as well as bundled advanced third party tools leveraging direct bank integrations and big data analysis. Typical recovery has averaged 20% of lost orders with early adopters recovering over 40% of churned revenues.
• 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. Growth Edition is a turnkey solution that includes both a full Commerce solution and merchant account to get started selling online within days, all without the hassle of setting up individual merchant accounts, integrating to low level APIs, or managing integration with third party subscription billing or online marketing, testing/promotion tools.

Some additional features of the Fall Release enable Service Providers to:

• Get to Market Faster with Your Branded Customer Experience
  • Partner and Reseller Portals
  • 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
  • Salesforce.com Adapter+
• Simplify and Scale Your Recurring Revenue Business
  • Extended recurring and currency support for Purchase Order automation
  • 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
• Increase Conversion, Sell More
  • Expanded recurring global payments - SEPA EU Direct Debit for France, Spain, Belgium
  • Enhanced marketing tools with upselling, lead and dunning management, Google Analytics integration, affiliate segmentation, and reporting

To learn more about the Avangate Revenue Recovery Tools and the Avangate Growth Edition, visit the following links:

• Avangate Revenue Recovery Tools
• Avangate Growth Edition

Avangate has also unveiled a new microsite that exposes the "Truth in Payments." To read more about the "Top 10 Myths of Payment Processors," visit truthinpayments.com.