Migrating your membership organization to a new payment provider

When I took over YNPN-NYC earlier this month as Board Chair, I immediately hit the ground running with a new recurring payment provider, Recurly.

At some point in 2015, I became a client of a SaaS company using Recurly to manage their billing. I was getting a discount from them, which made my experience with the platform all the more interesting.

In the past, YNPN-NYC managed recurring membership dues with PayPal. After a site redesign, a new member was processed via SquareSpace purchase with a Mailchimp auto-subscribe. It was a seamless transition and kept you on the site. To be honest, I wasn’t involved back when PayPal was the primary payment solution.

So, here we are at the end of 2015 with members in low triple digits recurring annually on PayPal and a few hundred with SquareSpace purchased memberships.

With this great divide, I knew I would need something that would be self-managing, with a low barrier to entry. It also had to be elegant by today's standards. I didn’t know a ton about Recurly, but I knew I had to test it.

What sold me on Recurly was the ecommerce-like nature of it. Customers come, checkout, and then are processed annually. It’s blatantly simple.

Another huge sell was the twice daily sync of active subscriptions with Mailchimp. I wouldn’t have to manually export. Even if this integration wasn’t built in, I could have used Zapier. The icing on the cake is that if someone cancels their membership, it removes them from the list.

Implementation

I recently launched a new CRM for Stupid Cancer. With the CRM, I took the approach of “today is the first-day” type of mentality. I knew I may be disrupting things for legacy members, but that new leads would be unaffected. My hunch was correct.

Once our Recurly account was set up (About a 15–30 minute process of fully customizing and setting up payment processor), I pulled down the old membership form.

After I was confident it was set up correct, I waited for the new members to show up. Luckily, a launch in January meant that I could leverage people's resolutions with clever marketing.

Once the process was set and I saw how the Mailchimp sync worked, I compiled all of the active legacy members with their name, email, and anniversary date. I uploaded them into this new “active member” list.

Migrating Legacy Members

One important note about Recurly is that it adds two private fields to Mailchimp. Since we offer one plan, these fields are always populated with the same info. With a quick sort on MC, I can see who is a new 2016 member and who isn’t.

Using Mailchimp segmentation, I can email the people whose Recurly fields are blank with an anniversary before the date of that communication. This is how I figure out which members are expired within the new configuration. I haven’t decided how many times legacy/non-Recurly members will receive a renewal prompt before I migrate them to the non-member list.

Obviously, it’s in my interest recapture as many of these legacy members as possible. For some, they may not even realize their membership has lapsed. Using coupon codes, I can spice it up a little bit and play around with how much of a discount it takes to have people come back aboard as a member. Since people move or transition careers, it’s no surprise that we won’t have 100% return. That’s not a realistic goal, anyway.

Customer Service

The best part about Recurly is the self-managing nature of it. As a consumer, subscriber, member, human, I want to be in control of what’s going on, especially when it comes to paying for things. Why shouldn’t we grant the same to our members?

Recurly sends an email 7 days prior to a member's anniversary letting them know in one week they will be billed. A member then has the option to cancel, update billing, or sit back and let it happen. As I mentioned earlier, if they cancel, they will be removed from the Mailchimp list.

If their billing fails, magic within Recurly will try to resolve an issue such as a bad expiration date without automatically reaching out to the subscriber. If Recurly is unable to automatically sort it out, subscribers will receive a few nudges.

Moving Forward

Migrating an entire membership base can seem like a daunting experience. As with most things in my day-to-day life, I try to approach a problem and see if there is a modern solution for it.

While it is widely known that the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one, it can also be costly to spend time on the things that Recurly will handle for me.

Reception

The move to Recurly has been a really great one for the organization. We've had over 75 members sign up in the first 18 days.

Migrating from Volusion to Bigcommerce

The Beginning

In March 2012, I stepped into the ecommerce world and launched a Volusion store for my non-profit, Stupid Cancer. I understood the basic functions of ecommerce, and felt like I could figure the rest out as I went. My expectations were pretty accurate, and found that navigating the unknown was a lot of fun. I picked Volusion because a colleague of mine had found success with their platform, and like any other digital software vertical, there were so many options. The sales started, issues that popped up along the way were remedied, and before I knew it, I had a successful online store.

Remember when you learned how to drive? That sense of confidence that followed? Before you knew it, you wanted to go faster.

Enter Bigcommerce: I received a solicitation to take a tour of their product by a Bigcommerce sales rep. I found myself building a carbon copy of my store on their platform within the first hour, and noticed the little things that were different than what I had been used to. I found myself building out shipping rates by weight, and entering those pesky sales tax rates by county. (Thanks a lot for that, by the way, New York State. #sarcasm)

I have to insert here that Volusion did get me off the ground with a very generous 80% discount. So, while Bigcommerce was unable to offer the same discount, I felt like I was getting much more in personal back and forth e-mails with their team, along with some on-boarding conference calls.

So here I am, with the holidays approaching rapidly and a steady flow of orders coming in, planning to abandon ship with Volusion and start on a new course.

I had everything pretty much built out on BC when it came time to flip the DNS. I say pretty much, because you’re never really ready when it comes time to go live.

Going Live

To my surprise, my new store was online about two hours later, and the orders resumed. A critical step here is to put your old store into maintenance mode, and have your provider restore it back to its original(demo) URL. Luckily, I was headed to a conference for the days following, so I had some downtime to watch the fallout, which ended up being related to the following:

301 Redirects

This is arguably the most important thing you will need to do. With a new ecommerce platform comes a new URL structure. For example, http://store.com/productname could end up being http://store.com/product-name. Anyone who searches for your product and clicks on your old URL will get a big old “Page Not Found.” Bigcommerce makes it easy to point potential customers in the right direction.

Shipping Rates

You probably set these up once and then left them alone, right? With Bigcommerce, I had an issue where I capped off my shipping rates at 2 pounds, without a price for anything heavier. This resulted in customers not being able to proceed with checkout. Make sure you test everything thoroughly, and let customers get in touch with you easily. (Install a “Contact Us” tab.)

Payment Processor

I was operating under the assumption that I had a relationship outside of Volusion with Authorize.net.  I plugged in my payment gateway info into my new store, and subsequently learned that it would be a breach of contract if I moved forward with that setup. I investigated my options, and found that PayPal Pro is a very nice solution if you're already accepting PayPal payments in your web store. It's a seamless application, and you get the great service that PayPal provides. (It's important to note that you can use a new Authorize.net account with Bigcommerce. You cannot use your Volusion Authorize.net account with Bigcommerce.)

Moving Forward

Once I had everything pretty much straightened out, I focused on getting my product offering back up to 100%. A new store offered the opportunity to audit my product images, descriptions, etc.

Having been live on Bigcommerce for a few weeks now, I am much happier with the mobile version of my store, and am seeing a lot of mobile checkouts. I was also happy to see that a lot of my favorite tools integrate just as well, if not better, with Bigcommerce. Check them out on the Bigcommerce App Store.