One key to converting prospects and increasing cross-border sales is to provide your potential subscribers with the option to use the payment method they most prefer. 

For many merchants, the ability to offer additional payment methods is not always an easy or straightforward endeavor. Which countries to expand into first? Which payment methods are most popular in which regions? What increase in conversion should we expect to see? These are all great questions to consider when planning expansion opportunities for your business. 

GoCardless: New Global Payment Gateway

Recurly is excited to announce a new integration with GoCardless, the industry leader in direct debit payments such as ACH, SEPA, Bacs, and others targeting major markets across the globe. Recurly’s integration with GoCardless allows subscription businesses to utilize the strength of the GoCardless platform for recurring payments, along with the power of Recurly’s subscription management platform. Recurly’s integration with GoCardless will streamline much of the complexity that comes with adding new payment methods. 

GoCardless currently offers eight direct debit payment methods in key markets. This is important because while credit cards may be predominant in North America, in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, the use of alternative payment methods is far more common. For example, SEPA in the EU and BACS in the United Kingdom are extremely popular payment methods, preferred over mobile wallets and other methods (such as PayPal and Amazon) which comprise 24% of the total transaction volume in the EU.

Improved transaction success rates

Direct debit payment methods can also offer higher retention  rates, compared to other payment methods—with decline rates as low as 2% compared to credit card decline rates, which average 15%. This decrease in decline rates can offer a huge boost to your new subscriber acquisition and revenue generation. 

Another benefit of GoCardless is that it can be used as an add-on solution for processing direct debits payments, even if a merchant is using another gateway for processing credit cards. 

The ability to use more than one payment gateway also enables our Gateway Failover feature. 

Reduced compliance concerns

Direct debit payments can be subject to increased compliance requirements, such as regulations imposed on SEPA transactions. Recurly has partnered with GoCardless to abstract much of this compliance complexity and absorb that into Recurly’s turn-key, hosted payment pages. Our integration also supports merchants taking on the compliance burden, where GoCardless can approve your integration’s compliance requirements. 

Recurly has been offering support for SEPA transactions via our hosted payment pages since early February 2020 and is excited to introduce API/Recury.js support, as well. Support for additional direct debit payment methods, such as ACH (US), Bacs (UK), and PAD (Canada) is coming soon. To help our merchants maximize their revenue, Recurly’s goal is to support the payment methods that subscribers prefer to use.

Learn more

For an in-depth analysis, published monthly, of the complexities and challenges in the international recurring payments space, check out the Global Recurring Payments Tracker, PYMNTS and GoCardless collaboration.

To see which EU countries GoCardless supports, visit this page. And to learn more about the gateways and countries Recurly supports, check out our Payment Gateways page.

And for more information about Recurly and GoCardless, please contact us today by scheduling a Sales Call or contacting Support.