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Subscription Commerce

Subscription Commerce Platforms offer a host of features to enable and manage end-to-end subscription lifecycle processes for Merchants. Unlike Commerce platforms that were primarily designed and built for selling physical goods, digital subscription platform (for SaaS products) features and complexity change dramatically based on the types of products being offered.

Subscription Commerce

What makes building subscription marketplaces hard? There are plenty of startups who've set out to solve the challenges of Subscription Commerce marketplaces over the last decade, yet very few, if any, have come close to solving the puzzle.

In the past decade, almost every single business has moved or has been moving towards selling their Products and SKUs on a recurring (monthly/yearly/etc.) basis. The eCommerce solutions they had in place for on-premise, perpetual licenses or one-time sale products, and the salesforce, retail and partner channels they used to working with suddenly didn't translate well for recurring business models. The complexity of having 1st party products and 3rd party products to create bundles and addons didn't scale well either. While existing businesses initially struggled to digitize their SKUs and set the right pricing for the new subscription SKUs vs the soon to be deprecated perpetual licenses, the new SaaS businesses that started in the last 10+ years didn't have the same pricing challenges for their subscriptions. However, almost all businesses that evaluated Build vs Buy decided to go with Buy, so that they can focus their energies on their core products and services rather than creating and maintaining homegrown marketplaces.

A handful of Marketplace Development Platform companies focusing on solving subscription commerce saw this digital transformation years ahead of others and especially ahead of the incumbent Commerce platform providers. As an early employee at one of those companies, AppDirect, I have been part of the journey that took us from a scrappy startup to a leader in the Forrester Wave and Gartner Research reports. And over the last 8 years, I have had the privilege of building and executing the ambitious product vision and roadmaps, introducing several new product modules and launching merchants in various geographies around the world, all the while staying ahead of the competition.

Unlike the marketplaces run by Aggregators (for mobile ecosystems: Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, that also took off in the 2010's) where the aggregators have: Direct relationship with their Users, Zero Marginal Costs for serving additional Users, and Demand driven Multi-sided networks that force ISVs/developers to come to aggregator's platform on their terms, enterprise marketplace development platforms have none of these benefits. Instead, enterprise marketplace platforms must play by a completely different set of rules (configurability of almost every aspect of the platform, API addressability, corporate and government compliances, reporting, etc.). More about the Marketplace features that differentiate eCommerce platforms from Subscription Commerce platforms will be published in a different post.

Large enterprises have often leveraged these platforms to not only sell their 1st party products, but also to add 3rd party catalog products to their white-labled marketplaces. SMB and Resellers have typically configured storefront using vanilla features and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have only leveraged the storefronts as referral marketplaces to generate leads and often push them directly into their lead-generation tools.

Whatever your subscription commerce use-case is, AppDirect's Marketplace Development Platform offers a solution! Get a free trial today!