Challenge
Prior to the launch of the tete marche's new SINIS product, development operations were labour-intensive and there were significant concerns over whether these operations could continuously scale once the service launched. After the positive response to the free service, the company realised there was an opportunity to create additional revenue by migrating to a billing model. In order to offer a monthly subscription model, tete marche looked to partner with a payments platform to manage billing for the subscription service.
Solution
tete marche chose Stripe Billing to make getting started with subscription-based payments easier than ever. Stripe Billing automatically processes everything from contract management and calculations of applicable charges, consolidating them for each of tete marche's customer’s regular monthly payment.
Results
By introducing Stripe Billing, tete marche has successfully minimised the work of processing and managing subscriptions. The introduction of Stripe billing ensured a speedy release in less than a month from the start of development with no holdups due to subscription-related issues, such as calculating fees and managing customers.
"We picked Stripe because we thought the benefits were worth the cost!"
In tete marche's own words: "The main reason we chose Stripe over other payment service providers was the high demands of our engineers. tete marche has used Stripe Billing as the basis for its subscriptions ever since the service launched. The support from Stripe engineers, our direct conversations with their employees during meetings hosted by Stripe prior to choosing the service, and the speed of integration all drove our decision to use Stripe. When considering which payment service provider to select from a business perspective, Stripe’s transaction fees seemed more expensive compared to other payment companies that have discounts for startups, and for a time we were unsure if Stripe was the right solution for us. However, we eventually chose to go ahead because we found that in addition to the speed of the process from application to integration, the benefits of the mid- and long-term operational improvements provided by Stripe Billing and the incredibly engineer-friendly and user-friendly API and development documents outweighed the transaction fee.
Despite integrating Stripe Billing with payment and subscription management features, everything from development to launch was still accomplished in less than a month."
"Stripe Billing improved our operations"
After releasing the service, tete marche encountered the typical challenges that can be expected when starting to bill customers. For example, there were customers inquiring about refunds with the Customer Success Team, and the Accounting Team was involved in processing and issuing coupons and verifying sales.
"The tete marche Inside Sales Team also manages customer success, and our small number of staff meant that we needed to consolidate these operations and manage them more efficiently. By integrating Stripe, we were able to manage almost every accounting operation, including refunds and processing coupons, using only the Stripe dashboard, with no need to develop a separate internal management system. We used the features offered by Stripe to build internal infrastructure, where Stripe once more demonstrated its usefulness by managing operations and leaving our engineers free to focus on development."
I anticipate that in the years ahead Stripe will continue to offer regionalised products that meet users’ needs. I look forward to further enhancing the tete marche’s functions with each new Stripe release.