Rainex is a billing and subscription management platform.
Is there a difference between a platform and a payment gateway? - you may ask. Let's start by understanding what a payment gateway is.
A payment gateway is a technology that enables the secure and seamless transfer of financial transaction information between a merchant’s website or point-of-sale system and a payment processor. The gateway directly authorizes and processes payment transactions between the merchant and the customer.
Yes, payment gateways can include additional tools like recurring payment management or payment analytics. However, the basic process of their functioning consists of only 7 steps:
- A customer initiates a payment by providing payment information, such as credit card details, on a merchant’s website or at a physical point of sale.
- The payment gateway encrypts sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) to ensure secure transmission over the Internet.
- The payment gateway forwards the encrypted payment information to the payment processor or acquiring bank.
- The payment processor sends the transaction details to the issuing bank (the bank that issued the customer’s credit card). The issuing bank then checks the transaction for available funds and checks other factors to determine whether to approve or decline the transaction.
- The issuing bank sends an authorization code or a decline notification back to the payment processor via the payment gateway.
- The payment processor sends the response back to the merchant’s system via the payment gateway.
- If the transaction is approved, the customer’s payment is complete and the merchant can proceed to fulfill the order or provide the purchased goods or services.
Popular examples of payment gateways include Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Authorize.Net. Businesses choose payment gateways based on factors such as transaction fees, ease of integration, security features, and the types of payments they wish to accept.
What is the difference between a billing platform and a payment gateway?
While both billing platforms and payment gateways play roles in facilitating online transactions, they serve different functions within the broader process of managing payments and subscriptions.
A billing platform is a comprehensive system designed to manage the entire billing process for recurring services, subscriptions, and other invoicing needs. It goes beyond processing individual transactions and encompasses the overall management of customer subscriptions, plans, and billing cycles.
In their majority, the platforms provide the following services:
- Integration: Integrates with payment gateways for payment processing but extends functionality beyond transaction management.
- Subscription Management: Enables the creation, modification, and cancellation of subscription plans.
- Invoicing: Generates and sends invoices to customers based on their subscription plans.
- Customer Management: Manages customer information, including billing details and subscription history.
- Revenue Recognition: Tracks and recognizes revenue over time, especially relevant for businesses with recurring revenue models.
- Analytics and Reporting: Provides insights into subscription metrics, customer behavior, and revenue trends.
Summing Up:
Scope of Functionality: A billing platform covers a broader spectrum of functions related to managing subscriptions, customer relationships, and revenue recognition. In contrast, a payment gateway is focused specifically on processing payments for individual transactions.
Business Focus: Billing platforms provide tools for managing ongoing customer relationships and revenue streams. Payment gateways, on the other hand, are essential for any business accepting online payments, regardless of the billing model.
Integration Points: Thanks to integration, the payment gateway is an element of the billing platform. This creates a comprehensive subscription management and payment processing system. The billing platform handles the subscription lifecycle, while the payment gateway facilitates secure payment transactions.
So, back to square one, Rainex is a billing and subscription management platform.
Rainex acts as an intermediary between you and the gateway, easing your integration problems directly on the one hand and opening up many more options through integrations with multiple payment gateways simultaneously on the other. Rainex’s multi-gateway and smart routing is your trusted conduit for global development of your product.
Rainex provides you with all the functionality you need for:
- Effective management of customer subscriptions;
- Flexible creation of pricing plans;
- Expanding plans with addons and charges, opening up upsale opportunities;
- Automatic generation of invoices and credit notes and monitoring of customer payments;
- Simplified interaction with taxes on the international market thanks to the built-in system of value-added tax definition and calculation;
- Quality multi-lingual automated communication with customers;
- Reducing churn and non-payments with a dunning system for automatic and standard payments;
- Decision-making based on reliable data with comprehensive built-in analytics.
And Rainex Customer Portal takes your interaction with customers to a fundamentally different level, allowing them to manage their subscriptions themselves (within your settings). This is not only convenient for you and the customer, but also increases the transparency of interaction, which is beneficial for customer trust and loyalty.
Wrap Up
Choose a tool that meets the needs of your business now and with an eye to the future, to planned growth and development. After all, with an ever-growing flow of customers, switching from one tool to a completely different one can be quite complicated, long and costly.
At the initial stage, a good payment gateway with a couple of additional tools and a table in Excel may be enough. But when there are 1000 customers? And when 10,000? How many resources and time will be spent just on invoicing alone? And when you want to take your product internationally and 1 gateway integration won’t be enough to reach your target audience?
Your tool should give you flexibility, provide you with growth prospects and be a reliable backbone to accomplish the necessary tasks. Your tool is Rainex.
