Blog

El Clasico refers to the annual soccer match between two well-known soccer clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid.

With some of the best players in the world on both sides, the November ‘09 match was fascinating to watch for both individual brilliance and sublime team play.

What does great soccer have to do with robust online billing? Quite a lot, actually. Both are about how different parts that work together well make for success. Understanding how components like automated retry logic, flexible payment methods, chargeback management, and sales-tax calculation should integrate to maximize customer lifetime value is critical for online billing, whether home-grown or outsourced. For example, it does no good if you have an ideal strategy for winning customers but then your chargeback rate exceeds the infamous one percent and the MasterCard and Visa fines are threatening your bottom line.

Also, ensuring that those pieces fit together in theory is only one piece of the puzzle. Operating at scale is another. As your business expands, ask yourself if your billing operations can support subscribers in different geographies with multiple payment methods and communications in your customers’ preferred language. There is no greater frustration if your product or service is a great match for a particular market segment yet you can’t properly meet your customers’ needs in terms of billing and payment infrastructure. Focusing on those areas early minimizes the work and overhead that you have to absorb as your business grows.