What’s next for Recurly Commerce

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining today's discussion exclusively for Prime customers on what's next with Recurly Commerce.

For those that haven't met me personally, my name is Kai, and I was formerly on the prime team as the founding customer success manager. And now I am currently on the customer success team here at Recurly to support you all. I'm joined today by Jennifer Roderick, Recurly's VP of customer success, and Matt Braun, our product lead for Recurly Commerce.

To start, I'd love to share how exciting it's been to join Recurly through the PRiV acquisition.

It's really clear that Recurly is deeply committed to its customers and are truly the experts in subscriptions, and the team has been so welcoming to me.

And, you know, now with even more access to engineering and product resources, we're really in a position to innovate faster and bring even more value to the market and to you all as our clients.

So why are we here today? We've had some questions over the past few weeks during the transition from Privyr to Recurly.

So we thought we'd just bring all of our customers together and really create a space to get all of your questions answered.

So in terms of our agenda for today, Jen will give a little bit of background behind the acquisition and the ecosystem of Recurly. Then we'll look at the product road map with Matt. And, finally, we'll open up the floor to get your questions answered. So with that said, Jennifer, please take it away.

Alright.

Hopefully, you can all hear me well. Thanks so much, Kai, for the, introduction.

Hi, everybody. My name is Jen Roderick, and I am the head of customer success here at Recurly. And I just wanna start by welcome you all to the Recurly family and, into our ecosystem.

We've got, much to learn from all of you and much to share.

As we really look at, for those of you who have not really had an introduction to Recurly yet, I know we've been making our way through, and getting to know some of you. But for those of you who had not had an introduction to us, I wanted to start today by giving you just a little bit of background about who we are, in the subscription space and in the ecom space. So Recurly was founded in two thousand and nine, and we've been a leader in the subscription game ever since.

We're a global company. We have offices in Texas, Colorado, the United Kingdom, Columbia, and India. So we are spreading our wings, learning to work with our global partners, and enjoying that expansion.

We work with more than two thousand two hundred customers, primarily in the b to c space, but we have a lot of b to b customers as well, supporting more than sixty seven million subscribers. And we process one over one point four million billion, sorry, not million, but billion transactions every day. That's a lot of volume going through our system and a lot of people who are trusting in Recurly and in our merchants to provide them with a great experience.

We are so proud, to be aligned with some really great long term customers such as Twitch, Paramount Plus, FabFitFun, and Alaska Airlines, all who who have helped, we've helped really grow and establish their subscription business.

You know, we'll talk a little bit about more and more about those, but those are customers just, you know, on the top of the list who are who have been with us for a very long time since we came on board.

When you think about, in addition to those merchants and helping our merchants grow, Recurly is really known in the subscription space as a leader in revenue recovery.

So last year alone, we we recovered one point three billion dollars in failed payments for our customers with our proprietary features that are things like intelligent retries, more to come from Matt on that, Dunning, account refresher, and a few others. So, you know, those features and many of the others will be coming into the pride now recurly commerce application over time, and we're really excited to be able to bring those to you.

So with no further ado, again, just wanted to say we're really excited that you're with us, and welcome to the family.

As we think about ecommerce, we had a we've had a lot of initial conversation from customers who have said, why is Recurly getting into the e commerce space? And I guess I would frame that as saying we've been in the space.

We work with customers, as I said, like, Scentbird and Seed and Fed Fit Fund who are in the ecomm space, and doing those things. But as we look at the market and where they were trying to go, they very much wanna bring subscriptions into that Shopify ecosystem as well. And we felt like it was time for us to really help those customers who have been long term partners with us address those needs. So, again, taking a quick look at just even FabFitFun, they've been with us since twenty twelve. That's a really long time, a thirteen year partnership, and we've helped them grow to over a million subscribers.

And it's a very tight and and and ongoing partnership. They've been someone who's asked us to help think about how they get into kind of that Shopify space.

And working with those companies, it's really helped us as a company, ever curly, really understand what matters in in modern ecommerce and the market trends that validate those priorities.

Alright. So let's talk a little bit about some of the trends. And for all of you who are in the space, these are things that probably are near and dear to you and things that you may already know. But we wanted to just take a few minutes to help you understand why the acquisition and why are we pushing more fully into the ecommerce space.

The ecommerce space is is booming, and all of you know that. Right? It's a great way to be out with your products and your services. So insights tell us that this market will only continue to grow as we move into twenty twenty six and beyond.

When you think about e commerce and customers trying to build more loyalty or more predictable revenue streams for their businesses, we already see that seventy five percent of direct to commerce brands are getting into the subscription space. It is a way for them to help produce additional revenue, but also predictable revenue.

And and we and we see that and we're experts in that area, so it's important for us to to bring that together. And then lastly, you know, subscribers are starting to demand more flexibility in how you as merchants earn their loyalty. With more than seventy percent of consumers really reporting that they want flexibility in their subscription programs, We all need to offer features like skips and swaps and pauses because they're becoming really day to day customer expectations for what you're providing.

So bringing together our solutions as we're currently and the private solutions, bringing those things together, our goal is to bring your company and all of your your consumers and subscribers the best possible feature sets.

Alright.

So as we think about what those ecommerce brands are doing to shift, they are getting, as I said before, they really are getting going from just one time subscriptions or onetime purchases into more of a subscription type base in order to drive additional predictable revenue, within their client base.

So we're we're here to help. Alright. Let's think about it. So why Recurly and Pride?

And and and together, you know, as I I alluded a few seconds ago, we're really starting and and wanted to be able to help drive, an ecosystem of tools that allowed your business to be more flexible, to be able to not just do one time things, but to also do subscription based offerings with your product. So we wanna make sure that we are serving our ecommerce merchants with a solution that is built for modern ecommerce.

That is it's a solution built for, yes, our Shopify stores. That's where we're starting.

And all of you are in that ecosystem. But we wanted to help build a platform that was high growth and, you know, high flexibility for your ecommerce business. And we wanted to deliver that solution fast. We wanted to get to market quickly.

So while we started down the road, here at Recurly of thinking about a Shopify integration, we found pride, and it made, what I would consider a really beautiful marriage. And so we're incorporating the plan is really to incorporate, the pride features and all the things that we're doing today into what we're calling Recurly Commerce. So I I do wanna take a side note. We did have some questions as I'm getting to know customers who have said, you know, are we staying is it going to stay the Prime application or are we going to have to migrate? Absolutely not. We're bringing Prime into our ecosystem.

We believe in the platform that is there today, and we will continue to iterate and grow based on the things that we all we see in the market.

And that's gonna bring you into that, in just a second. But I just wanted to say again, you know, as we move forward, we're currently pride. It's gonna be a beautiful situation. Our goal is to bring you lots of, you know, opportunity to grow and be, you know, and and to start to see the power of our expertise and our feature set in your private ecosystem. So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to the one and only Matt Braun.

Hey, Jeff.

Hi, everyone. I'm Matt from the product team here at Recurly, and I focus on the ecommerce space. I've had the opportunity to look under the hood of the private product, and I'll say I'm impressed.

When we demo to our early customers, they share the same feedback.

But I know we can make the product even better. I'm gonna walk you through a game changing capability that you can take advantage of today, plus I'll share what you can look forward to in the coming months.

As Jennifer said, churn reduction is our bread and butter and for good reason. Upwards of fifty percent of churn is due to failed payments. There are over two thousand reasons why a payment fails which can be overwhelming and time consuming to solve without an automated solution in place.

Recurly's revenue optimization engine leverages over fifteen years of payment recovery data and machine learning to intelligently retry customer payments with a tailored approach.

As you can see on the slide, the results speak for themselves.

For example, a successful renewal is one of the most important aspects of a subscription. With intelligent retries, recurring customers typically see a ninety six percent, payment success rate. This leads to meaningful revenue recovered as also shown on the slide. I'm happy to share that as of this week, intelligent retries is now available in Recurly Commerce.

So a bit more about how intelligent retries fits into the broader picture to address failed transactions.

As you can see there on the left, we are partnering with Shopify and their built in tools. Shopify's built in tools help prevent failed payments from things like expired or invalid cards. That is only part of the picture. If a renewal failure occurs, this is where Recurly's intelligent retries take in to provide the value I've mentioned on the previous slide. And in addition to intelligent retries, Recurly provides Dunning email notifications to also encourage your subscribers to address payment failures. As you'll see in just a couple of minutes, we're continuing to invest in further enhancements to Dunning to make that feature even more powerful.

In summary, Recurly provides additional important strategies alongside Shopify to help ensure payment success with every renewal.

Now let's quickly touch on how you start taking advantage of intelligent retries right now. The first step is logging into early commerce via your Shopify store and clicking on settings.

As shown in the screenshot on this slide, select intelligent retries as your payment failure experience.

Click save and you're done.

Going forward, anytime there's a failed payment, intelligent retries will trigger and work to recover lost revenue.

We highly recommend you go activate intelligent retries now and start taking advantage of this great feature.

So as you see on this slide, we are committed to continued investment in our early commerce. We have several upcoming exciting features that I'll speak to. Each feature rolls into themes or value propositions that we always keep in mind. Those are to increase renewal success, increase average order value, improve subscriber experience, and increase retention.

With that, I'll touch on several of the listed features.

As you'll see, we've broken them out into phases with phase one, two, and three in the different quarters.

Quarter two here is actually just a handful of days, so some of this is already done. So as you'll have seen, Priv now has a Recurly Commerce name, so we've rebranded the Recurly Commerce we rebranded to the Recurly Commerce app.

We have So also too we took care of integrating the support docs too so if you haven't checked those out please go check those out today. There's a wealth of information in there too that speaks in great detail about all the features and how to use the product. And we continue to always adapt and modify and evolve those to make sure that that is a great self-service function for you to use.

Next, enabling intelligent retries. As I just mentioned, that is available today. Please go ahead and turn it on right after this call, if you don't mind.

The next, moving to resilient scale infrastructure.

So the Recurly Commerce app is already on great infrastructure, but we have even more robust and scalable infrastructure that is powering over two thousand merchants a day across the world. So we're bringing the Recurly Commerce app into that broader infrastructure to again result in greater at times, even more stability and security, ultimately allowing you to focus on providing subscriptions in the Shopify sales.

And last but not least for q two support for subscription linking, this is another evolution towards bundling where you can essentially link subscriptions together.

So there might be situations where you wanna have certain requirements between subscriptions to ultimately lead to a higher outage order value. We were working on a feature to help make that possible for you.

Taking us into phase two, q three, a lot of features. Now again, I should also clarify too, there's a ton of things that we're working on, but also this is directly influenced by your feedback too. So please continue those conversations with your customer success manager, myself, and through support so that we are making sure we're working on the right things for.

So the first two on the list is enhanced dunning. As I hinted at, we have dunning within the product. We know there's even more we can do to make that even more robust for you too to again ultimately lead to convincing the subscriber to have a valid payment method on file. So more to come in the Dunning space. And also what's fantastic about being part of the broader Recurly, we've already been offering this enhanced and advanced Dunning features for many, many years to thousands of merchants. So we're bringing that over to Recurly Commerce.

Next, becoming an official Shopify Plus partner. Shopify is very excited by this acquisition of a great product and bringing that into the broader portfolio.

We have a strong partnership with them that we only wanna make even stronger. So we wanna become a Shopify Plus partner. This process has already kicked off, and this again just brings us up another level in terms of meeting even more stringent requirements that ultimately benefits you as a customer taking advantage of Recurly Commerce.

Next, personalization personalized cancellation flows. So we have cancellation flows within the product. This is allowing you to bring even more personalization to this cancellation flow. So maybe instead of having, say, ten different responses that might feel a little generic and not necessarily tailored to the product that they're canceling, this is going to allow you to bring a little bit more specificity too so that the responses make you know, make clear sense from that first interaction with them. Ideally, you would say, again, I'm trying to convince them to stay a loyal subscriber.

The next, the real time subscriber indication tools, We have, again, what's great about being part of Accruity, we have a broad product portfolio too. We have investments and engagement tools that are very powerful that are used across many different channels. We're looking to tie that into the Shopify sales channel to allow you to further engage your customers, not only when they're canceling, but also before that too.

The next, improved data and and analytics. Again, there's great analytics within the Recruit Commerce platform today. But as you may have seen, and if if you haven't, I highly recommend checking it out. We have the state of subscriptions report that Recurly puts out on an annual basis. That is just a taste well, it's actually quite deep and extensive of all the data that we are collecting from merchants that drive success and putting that into a very extensive set of analytics that you can use to ultimately drive a higher ROI from your subscriptions. So looking to leverage all that insight knowledge and bringing that again to Shopify so that you can see ultimately how that channel is is performing.

Easier payment update. This is a very recent change within Shopify that is gonna allow us to, essentially own the payment method update rather than kicking that over to Shopify to do. So by putting this into place, it's gonna reduce the amount of clicks and then reduce the amount of friction for a customer to update their payment method if there is a failure.

Next is your free trial configuration too. We know how powerful this can be too to ultimately try to convince someone to try out your product and then ideally become a loyal subscriber. So we wanna make that process even easier for you and have it continue to remain flexible too. So if you wanna do a seven day trial, fourteen day trial, or so forth, we want it to be simple to configure and intuitive, but that ultimately allow you to see what the conversion is looking like in terms of going from a free trial to a paid subscriber.

Last but not least here in q three, support for an early termination fee. So we do have some merchants and customers that are interested in having a, a different type of subscription where there might be, for example, a hardware product associated with a software service. It might be a costly hardware device or product associated with that. So it introduces this concept to have having a, subscription that you want to ensure a certain tenure.

So if you're clear with your subscriber upfront too, there might be an early termination fee. We understand that is a an important use case for some of you, so we wanna make sure to support that. So that's what we're planning for in q three there. K. So then again, a lot of stuff here too. Let me also give you a quick, peek into q four as you can see on there too.

So I'll touch on q four here first with the AB subscription AB testing a subscription offers. Again, this is all about it's trying to drive every dollar you can. Right? Not only in checkout but also in our mills. So this is bringing more enhancements to that space to allow you to do that AB testing throughout the subscription offering and even as far as discounts too. So exciting stuff to come that free on q four.

And the next two go together in terms of increasing average order value.

We ultimately want to support your ability to encourage your subscriber to put more not only in their card during checkout, but also upon renewal orders. And this is done through a combination of things, right, with different carousels and views and logic to present the right product at the right time to ideally convince them to select that and move forward with it to again increase average order of that. And that goes along with the bundling options too. So for example, if you want to encourage them to not only subscribe to one product but to subscribe to two or three, it's natural to want to incentivize them to, for example, provide a five percent discount on top of that. So we wanna support you in your ability to do that.

Next, automated revenue recognition. This again is part of our broader Recurly product portfolio. So if you're looking into revenue recognition, we have a tool for that. We want to integrate that within the Recurly Commerce product so that you can then again do revenue recognition for your sales coming through Shopify.

The last or well, second to last are support for proration due to plan changes. This again is further bolstering and adding to our feature set to support subscriptions that may be related to digital subscriptions where it might be more common to accommodate proration. So if there's an upgrade or downgrade or cancel, there might be an expectation to prorate based off of that change. We wanna make sure to support that for you there in q four.

Then last but not least, enhanced international support. We do that well today within Recurly. We know there's even more that we can do within the Recurly Commerce product for Shopify. There's all these nuances within currencies, conversions, and so forth.

We wanna make sure that it's is done in a flexible way for you to optimally support different markets across the world.

Lots of great features there that we're very excited to do. In summary, there's several exciting ones coming. They're all directed at increasing your subscription success.

Please continue to share feedback as it directly influences our roadmap, and we'll be sure to let you know as these features are released. So that's it for the roadmap update. Kai, over to you.

Thank you very much for joining us. Kai, Matt, amazing as always. I just appreciate you both. And, reach out, please, if you need anything from us. We're here to help.