SaaS Onboarding & Payment Collection

Overview:  Selling a SaaS generally can be split into B2C and B2B.  Both SaaS models require the ability to onboard a customer and collect the payments for the service.  And to do this a website /Content Management System is need to allow the customer to trial, buy, purchase add-on and collect recurring revenue.

B2C SaaS (small to large):  You need "brochureware", web pages that show the service and allow the user to purchase.   As I generally sell SaaS software, and B2C is often 1 off or pay as you need, I'd recommend Shopify, there are add-ons for selling digital goods.  You can always use marketplaces like amazon or eBay also.  WooCommerce (integrates with WordPress), BigCommenrce, Magento, Wix, SquareSpace can be used for selling physical goods but need some thought and add-ons for digital goods.  All the options are not great at Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) e.g. Netflix, or ARR (annual, e.g. Grammarly, Blinkist) billing, or "pay as you consume" also referred to as "metered billing" or "pay-as-you-go pricing" (Uber, AWS, Twilio, Stripe, Azure, GCP) revenue models.  Pay-as-you-go pricing has variable costs but allows your to reduce the cost to your customer by only charging them for what they use.

Update 2022/06/24: Webflow is a great tool for semi web literate developers to build websites.  UI drag and drop experience.  In the Wix space but you drag vs choosing a template.  I've used it to generate clean semantically correct HTML/CSS to implement in a custom developed SPA solution.  Always consider Webflow, it has checkout and can easily integrate with Shopify and Zapier for simple workflows.  Has free SSL and you can host on their platform.  Priced per website but reasonable with various options.

There are plenty of add-ons but in the Shopify world it's bring in an add-on and a few moving pieces.  For a medium sized SaaS selling MMR solutions, the overhead of setting up and managing the processes is fairly steep.  As the business gets bigger, it's worth the integration or using a dedicated solution like ChargeBee.

B2B SaaS: Could use any revenue model but it is best if your product lends itself to subscription-based selling.  e.g. Office 365, Workday, Legal practice management software to manage clients and work for law firm.  For small SaaS startups selling digital services use a solution like ChargeBee (low end) or Paddle (top end).  You can use anything in-between and addons to get a solution but for the price, setup, expansion as a general rule ChargeBee is good:

1. Recurly
2. Chargify
3. Zuora
4. Chargify
5. Stripe
6. Billby (Good for startups)
7. ChargeBee (Good for startups)
8. Bill.com for Accounts payable and receivable.

In the UK, we need direct debits often setup, you can look at something like Bottomline PTX.  I also like recharge.

Privacy Management: OneTrust provides a good configurable SaaS service for cookies and privacy.  If not built into your CMS/platform, then OneTrust is an option.

Pay-as-you-go/metered billing:  You pay based on consumption of services you owed x for the last 30 days e.g. AWS, Azure.  I try to stay away from this model as it's normally difficult to understand and customers in SaaS as a general rule don't like complex unknown pricing models.

Traditional:  Basically, pay as you buy a license.  So you get a perpetual license.  Akin to physical shopping but for digital goods.  Shopify is perfect for this model with a digital download add-on.  E.g. bjjfanatics.com

SME SaaS Business Checklist:

1. Where you you selling, physical vs virtual
2. Subscription or 1 off payments (account maintenance), trials, upgrade, upsell and cross selling.  Autorenewals.
3. Jurisdictions (Tax, VAT, shipping, currency)
4. Cost (fees, what's included, percentage of sales, growth)
5. Support (Tech touch, Low touch e.g. email vs 24 hrs phone support, is this subscription based)
6. Retention (Churn, New, Length of time for customers, support churn warnings, unsubscribing).
7. Does my billing/subscription allow me to sell on web, native mobile, marketplaces.

Methods to set the SaaS price:

1. Value based pricing - set the price based on the value the customer saves/gets
2. Cost plus pricing - your cost plus markup
3. Competitor pricing - what our our competitors charging
4. Art of adjustment pricing - set a price see how much demand, change price how does it affect demand, MRR and total expected revenue.

Metrics to capture in SaaS Sales:

1. MRR
2. ARR
3. CLV (Customer lifetime value)
4. Churn rate
5. Cost of Customer Acquisition

Marketing: https://sproutsocial.com/

Support:  It's important to minimize human support effort, automating as much as possible is key.  Bots, knowledge articles that are easy to find are awesome.  Coveo does a nice job of setup for community channels.

User tracking:  Google analytics is pretty good for getting stats.  I do like a new tool to me Pendo which is expensive but extremely powerful.  Pendo's main 2 features for me are user interaction/how they use the site, and providing help tips/Guides are html injected into applications.

Shopify Teams meetings backgrounds

Overview:  I like to use a custom background in my Zoom and Teams meetings as I don't need to worry about what people and clients can see in my home.  We used Shopify to sell digital good (the customized meeting backgrounds).  

Solution:  Users can select a background that the rights had been purchased for.  Then could upload the company logo and add their name. It makes a pretty cool background effect and we used Shopify to create a online shop to allow people to order.  Originally we planned to use a ReactJS application on Azure for the creation and ordering but Shopify had a plugin that stored all the digital assets on AWS for $10/month.  Coupled with Shopify's low fees it was better to keep the whole system under Shopify.

Shopify also provides Channel/Sales buttons that you can place on blogs and websites.  They get pretty advance as shown below.

Problem:  Customers, originally we planed to sell each customise image for about the price of a cup of coffee ($5, £4).  The hard part was finding a way to get customers and convert them into paying customers.  Also as you generally only use 1 image their is no returning customer to offset the cost of acquisition.  Adwords proved nonviable, the cost of attracting customers was way in excess of  the return.  Also convincing people to input credit card made the  conversion rate even more difficult to make Adwords a viable option.

Summary:  Shopify is a great ecosystem and I have setup a couple of stores using it now.  It is fast, customisable, well thought out, great for a new starter.  It has tons of plug-ins, lots of free and purchasable themes/templates.  There is a lot of documentation, and a lot of expertise to help out.  We used Fiver for some scaling on my theme as i couldn't get the scaling 100%, easy to find and they person helped me right out.  In the end, a good experience, Shopify is awesome and easy.    

Shopify - Add optional installation on the cart for shoppers

Problem:  On my Shopify shopping cart, if a buyer is checking out and they have plants/flowers in their cart, I need to offer them the ability to have someone plant for them.

This could have various options such as in furniture, you could offer an assembly service.

Initial Hypothesis: Shopify use Liquid as it's scripting language.  Liquid allows us to combine Liquid with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to get the desired page behavior.  Below is my User Story:

As a shopper I want to be able to add labor to allow me to have my flowers/plants installed/planted so that I know an expert has got my flowers in correctly.

I also need to add the appropriate amount of labor, so if less than 3 plants charge for 1 hr  otherwise charge for 2 hrs.  Shopify has variants allowing me to have a labor product for 1 or 2 hrs.

Resolution:  Amend the cart.liquid cart summary page to allow for Labor to plant for the Shopper to easily be added.

Desired Behavior: 

Add a button to add installation

The optional installation cost for 1 hr is added to the store

Steps to Implement: 
1. Create a new Product in Shopify "Plant for me please".  Add it to a unique collection, mine was "Last Minute Checkout Items".  Add a couple of variants for time/cost as shown below:

2. Go to the Product page and append .xml to the end of the page e.g., https://nurserynearby.co.za/collections/last-minute-checkout-items/products/would-you-like-someone-to-plant-your-plants.xml and get the Variant_Id's, we need these to add the correct amount of labor cost later.
3. Open the cart.liquid file and add the  following logic:

Shopify thoughts

Overview:  Recently, I had two requests for some work around shopping carts/auctions.  I dismissed the first request as it is not what I specialize in.  On the second request, I decided to take the project on at a hugely discounted rate as I felt I did not have expertise in the field.

Shopify: Shopify is an amazing product and eco system, and I have build a great shop on the SaaS Shopify platform in record time.  There are great plug-ins to add functionality such as gift registry's, and Mobile add integration.  I have now been playing with the product, deliver solutions, worked with app vendors, reviewed competitor's, had help from Shopify support and I can honestly say that it is awesome.

Program-ability:

• There are simple API's that are well documents.  
• The internal language is Liquid which is basically a UI scripting language.
• Shopify SaaS has add ins and templates, so look before developing

Liquid:

In the code snippet above I am building custom functionality int he cart checkout to add specific products to allow more sales on the store depending on custom rules provided by the customer.

Mobile:
The templates OOTB or that shop admins can purchase follow responsive design as one would expect.  There are add-ons for iOS and Droid to make native apps, very well priced with good functionality changed on a monthly reoccurring basis (circ $40-100/month).  I need a custom mobile app for both platforms so I'm between choosing to build with Flutter or Blazor.