Why Adding Payments Can Take Your Software from Nice-to-Have, to Can’t-Live-Without

If you are a software-as-a-service provider, then you know how important a great customer experience is in generating long-standing relationships with your clients, and fueling your ongoing business revenue.

Today’s modern vertical SaaS providers are the engines that businesses run on – serving verticals ranging from medical clinics to field service management, to gym and fitness centers.

As the market moves towards holistic and personalized services, SaaS platforms are evolving and expanding their offering to provide a wider variety of features.

For software providers that service specific verticals, creating a positive experience and outperforming the competition is a bigger ask than ever before. It involves being able to provide a breadth of industry-specific software features, create seamless user experiences, and provide access to close, personalized support, to keep your clients happy and maintain positive relationships in the long term.

The most successful SaaS platforms are quickly realizing that to stay relevant in the market and keep their customers on their platform, they have to offer services that can solve for the essential needs of the clients they are serving.

By solving for the painful/manual processes their clients are facing, these vertical SaaS platforms become more than just a want. They become something your customers need.

Ask yourself: is your platform something your customers want, or is it something they really need? If the answer is more the former, it’s time to consider developing and expanding your platform’s offering, so you can become a provider that your customers can’t live without.

The opportunity within embedded payments.

Embedded payments are fast becoming a way for vertical SaaS companies to get ahead of their competition and strengthen the retention and affinity of their customers to their platform.

By integrating payment tools into your SaaS platform, you are elevating the capabilities of your software and addressing a core problem/need your customers face in running their everyday business.

With the ability to manage and process payments from within your platform, you are giving your clients, and their customers, a swift, convenient and secure means of handling transactions, streamlining the entire process for all stakeholders and opening up a world of opportunity for your platform’s reach and profitability. Read on to learn more as we discuss the benefits of adding payments in more detail.

Enhanced Customer Retention with an Omni-Channel Environment

Put yourself in the shoes of your clients — what do they need from your SaaS platform? They need convenience and a comprehensive set of tools in a unified digital environment. What’s more, their customers need this too.

With embedded payments, you can easily make secure transaction capabilities a key feature of your software. Clients don’t need to open another application to process a payment, and they can handle transactions from a number of different channels with secure integrations. On top of this, they can get enhanced business insights and make more informed decisions for their businesses, using your in-built reporting and unified payments data.

The result is an omnichannel payment environment that supports a myriad of customer needs from a central location, keeping your customers and their clients satisfied.

Boost Customer Lifecycle Revenue

The payment landscape is becoming increasingly diverse. While customers still use credit and debit cards to make transactions, other users may prefer to use different forms of payment, such as digital wallets and payment applications. If customers can’t access these options, not only is their experience going to suffer — they may be dissuaded from making a payment at all.

By reflecting the diversity of the payment landscape and integrating a range of payment options into your SaaS, you are meeting customer expectations at every turn. This means more opportunities for payments, translating into increased full lifecycle revenue for your clients.

Case studies from previous Payrix integration projects have shown that integrating payment features can result in two to five times more revenue per customer for SaaS providers.

Set Yourself Apart from Competitors with More Features

Your clients have choices when it comes to SaaS providers, and the vertical SaaS market is quickly growing in competition. Any opportunity you can find to set yourself apart from the competition is a valuable one — and this includes incorporating payment features into your platform.

It’s quite simple — if you are offering something your competitors are not, then you are the preferred option for your clients. Make sure you are covering all the bases with embedded payment services.

Achieve a Global Outlook for Clients (and Yourself)

Your clients are always looking for new ways to grow, and this growth can come from many different sources. The digital revolution has expanded the scope of small businesses, putting international markets within the grasp of SMEs.

To take advantage of this international potential, your clients need payment solutions with a global outlook. Modern payment solutions can process transactions in a number of different currencies and using a number of different international accounts and cards — embed these solutions into your SaaS platform and support your clients to achieve their international expansion.

While you’re at it, employ the same international capability to your platform reach, and you can start offering your software in new locations you might not have considered before.

Streamline the Experience for Your Clients

Integrated payment tools do more than just handle transactions — they provide back-end capabilities for your clients to support effective business administration and data management.

With the right payment tools embedded into your systems, you are simplifying the payment process for your clients. What’s more, you are providing unified reporting capabilities that assist your clients as they gain critical insight into customers and operations. Reporting and management tasks are streamlined with automated features, reducing the time, cost and labor associated with business administration.

Payment Features Are Rapidly Becoming Software “Must-Haves”

With so much diversity in the payment solutions market, and with an increasingly global outlook for merchants and small businesses, payment tools are becoming critical. By embedding payment tools into their software offering, SaaS providers are gaining a valuable head start on their competitors.