Avangate launches first complete commerce platform for B2B tech vendors

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Avangate, the modern Digital Commerce solution provider, has announced over 200 new features as part of its new Summer '15 release. The company comments that the enhancements will enable service providers and digital innovators to eliminate revenue leakage and fully capitalise on new revenue moments.

With this new release of the Avangate Commerce Solution, the company is addressing the revenue leakage challenges digital businesses face in the New Services Economy, offering a unique set of tools and actionable insights to drive maximum customer value.

"The New Services Economy represents the next rapidly expanding trillion-dollar market and is reshaping how companies should view Digital Commerce. It's no longer a hit-and-run, one-time transactional economy. The proliferation of pay-as-you-go business models and the explosion of revenue moments across the activation, upsell/cross-sell, renewal and retention stages require companies to focus beyond just upfront customer acquisition," said Carl Theobald, CEO of Avangate. "Each revenue moment is an opportunity for digital businesses to build long-term relationships with their customers. Otherwise, it can be a point of failure that drains revenue. How companies navigate these moments and points of revenue leakage across the Commerce Lifecycle are life or death for digital businesses."

A recent, nationwide consumer survey commissioned by Avangate points to the increased appetite for online services and new consumer preferences for how they buy and subscribe. The data suggests that companies should adapt their customer retention strategies to take advantage of new revenue moments, beyond the initial acquisition phase.

Some of the key findings include:

• 54 percent of consumers use online services on a daily basis, and 95 percent of online shoppers make regular recurring payments.
• Based on per capita personal income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis [1], 26 percent of consumers are spending at least one-third of their disposable income on recurring online payments.
• The consumption of online services is skyrocketing, with 78 percent of U.S. adults paying for online services – a 50 percent increase from last June.
• More adult consumers are also becoming "power users" - with 15% paying for more than five online services in the last year versus just two percent of the population in June 2014.
• 97 percent of consumers prefer flexible purchasing options when selecting premium online services.
• 56 percent of consumers have replaced their credit card at least once in the last year.
• Excessive checkout processes, manually reentering payment information and inflexible payment options are three of the most common factors that negatively impact consumer purchasing decisions.

"Our data proves what we've long suspected: Digital transformation is changing consumer behaviors, and businesses need to adapt in order to take advantage of the New Services Economy. Consumers expect to interact with vendors and merchants at every point of engagement, whether online, in-store, in-app, via your call center, or even through partners. Every transaction is a revenue moment and needs to be a frictionless user experience - from initial purchase, to upgrade or downgrade, vacation hold, and early renewal," said Michael Ni, CMO of Avangate. "Our latest product release addresses the explosion of revenue moments driven by changing consumer behavior, and solves the problem of revenue leakage by helping digital businesses recover 10 to 20 percent of impacted revenue and converting it directly to revenue uplift."

Avangate's Summer '15 release of its modern Digital Commerce Solution addresses the increasing problem of revenue leakage throughout the Commerce Lifecycle. Key additions to Avangate's solution include:

• Active Conversion Tools: Control every revenue moment through new campaign types, interaction controls, and conversion dashboards to drive proactive account engagement and cancellation prevention.
• Enhanced Marketing Toolkit: Provide rapid experimentation with new online and retention templates, expanded A/B testing scenarios and statistics, and retention reporting.
• Advanced Revenue Recovery Tools: Improve authorization and conversion rates with expanded localized payment methods, optimized payment flow and conversion, and enhanced global failover and payment authorization.

"Avangate's Digital Commerce solution and expertise have enabled us to optimize our eCommerce strategy and online acquisition year over year, said Irina Sanaeva, Lead Marketing Manager, Online Media Technologies Ltd. "With today's increased focus on client retention, Avangate's commerce platform continues to prove its value, by helping us optimize conversion and renewal rates, while providing immediate reporting on KPIs that matter to our business. With the recently launched Revenue Recovery Tools, we have been able to reduce revenue leakage and obtain 14% revenue uplift on our auto-recurring subscriptions – important percentage points that we would have otherwise not recovered. We applaud Avangate's initiative to extend the RRT into proactive cancellation prevention and other tools that will help us improve retention even further."