Rethink Commerce Blog

Avangate is excited to announce the Fall Release of its comprehensive commerce platform with the addition of over 200 new features. A continuation of investments across 2014, the Avangate Fall Release introduces enhancements which enables you to boost conversion and retention rates, control and personalize consumer experiences and grow your business internationally while relying on seamless operational scalability.

Smarter Payments – Boost Conversions, Grow Recurring Revenues

The latest conversion enhancements make it even easier to grow and sustain recurring revenues with the addition of new tools and capabilities.

Avangate Revenue Recovery Tools

Avangate’s latest product, Revenue Recovery Tools (RRT) helps our customers increase revenues by increasing authorization rates, and minimizing uncollected revenue due to card declines and other revenue leakage areas.

Avangate’s Revenue Recovery Tools combine credit card account updaters, retry logic, automatic gateway failover, intelligent payment routing, as well as bundled third party tools that leverage direct bank integrations and big data analysis. Typical recovery results include gains of:

• 20% on lost orders
• 40% of churned revenue for early adopters
• 120% additional yearly revenue produced from retained customers

Learn more

Recurring Subscription Billing for B2B Commerce via Purchase Orders

Avangate has overhauled the way that Purchase Orders work to support better conversion and retention for B2B sales. With recurring billing on Purchase Orders, customers can now use multiple payment methods as opposed to just wire transfers. This means that the Avangate platform, with the auto-renewal option enabled, will automatically renew subscriptions acquired with Purchase Orders, with credit cards, PayPal or direct debits.

Additional Purchase Order enhancements include:

• Extended currency support for orders placed via Purchase Orders
• Easy access and download for the Purchase Order documentation needed to finalize purchases
• Improved user experience for the entire Purchase Order purchase flow

At the same time, business customers continue to have checks, wire and bank transfer available as alternative payment methods for all types of purchases.

Expanded Support for SEPA Direct Debit

Avangate continues to deliver the highest level of support for your business across major European markets by expanding SEPA Direct Debit transactions to new markets: Spain, Belgium and France, as well as The Netherlands, Austria and Germany, where SEPA was previously supported.

With Avangate, shoppers in Spain, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Austria and Germany can now use Direct Debit for single purchases as well as recurring transactions by providing their International Bank Account Number (IBAN) and Bank Identification Code (BIC) information, which makes cross-border transactions as easy as domestic payments.

Avangate also offers seamless support for recurring payments for customers using Direct Debit for auto-renewal, so shoppers can use this payment method not only for the initial subscription, but also for recurring charges.

Optimized Marketing Tools – Lead Management, Upselling, Trial Conversion

Customers can now set discounts and offer promotions alongside subscription renewals and new purchases alike. Upselling techniques like these can increase Average Order Value among returning customers, leading to revenue expansion.

The latest Lead management updates extend support for additional payment methods making it easy for customers to automatically reach out to customers worldwide and collect failed payments. In addition to credit cards, PayPal, Direct Debit and bank/wire transfers which were already supported, you will be able to set up notifications for transactions that failed to process successfully with: local cards used by Brazilian or by Chinese customers, WebMoney, iDeal and Direct eBanking, Boleto Bancario, Konbini, Qiwi, CashU, and Giropay.

Avangate has also increased the options at your disposal to convert trials to full paying subscriptions. In addition to the existing API and platform conversion capabilities, you can now send manual renewal links to users of trial subscriptions. The links will enable trial users to seamlessly convert from a trial to a paid subscription. Shoppers can alternatively log into their myAccount and use manual trial renewal conversion links whenever they wish.

2015 VAT Regulation Changes – What You Need to Know

Avangate is abreast of the ever-changing financial and legal requirements worldwide to ensure you are benefiting from a seamless and fully compliant buying and selling experience. A new set of European Union regulations for VAT (Value Added Tax) will come into effect starting January 1, 2015. These regulations directly impact suppliers and customers of telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services located in the EU.

As a provider of electronic services, Avangate is in full compliance with these new regulations. As an Avangate vendor, your shoppers will be automatically charged the correct VAT according to the new VAT regulations starting in 2015, with no additional effort on your part. As your dedicated provider of commerce services, Avangate is fully responsible for fiscal and legal regulatory compliance.

Smarter Payments – Rely on Seamless Operational Scalability

Avangate continues to optimize fundamental areas of the platform to deliver scalability, advanced testing and chargeback mitigations to support your global eCommerce efforts.

Distributed Infrastructure

Avangate is rolling out its optimized infrastructure with distributed architecture deployments for a boost in availability and performance. The new infrastructure improves loading times by over 15% and establishes an extra layer of downtime protection to safeguard against unpredictable events, minimizing risks for ordering and transactional processing.

Advanced Testing Tools Suite

Recently, Avangate released the Avangate testing platform to create end-to-end visibility and validate the entire eCommerce integration to and connection with your databases or other third-party services. Now, Avangate has taken that a step further and enhanced our API and webhooks, making it easy to check historical records of both successful events and failures.

Avangate’s API and Webhook Log Monitor streamlines tracking of API events (SOAP, JSON, REST – regardless of the version you’re using) and webhook interactions (IPN, LCN, IRN, EL_DEL, IDN), making it easy for you to troubleshoot problems and monitor performance.

Self Service Tools to Mitigate Chargebacks

Chargebacks can be frustrating, for you and for your customers. Now, you can empower your customers to handle refunds differently with new self-service capabilities created to reduce the volume of chargebacks:

• myAccount Optimizations allow customers to easily request refunds and also help you interact with users directly to better address their concerns.
• New Refunds Report provides an easier way to track and manage refunds so that you can respond, measure, and improve your product and customer support initiatives.
• The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system offers new self-service capabilities empowering users to quickly get their activation codes/keys resent to their email address or to easily disable recurring billing (auto-renewal).

Introducing: the Avangate Store

The launch of the Avangate Store brings even more visibility to your products and also decreases your chargeback rates by helping shoppers better understand who Avangate is and why they see “Avangate” on their credit card statements. To start this program, Avangate has selected a series of software, SaaS, and online services products that have agreed to the Avangate Email Marketing Program.

All sales go through the Avangate branded shopping cart, and Avangate also manages any subscription renewals.

Who can join?

At this time, only select vendors are eligible to join the Avangate Store.

How can I join?

Please approve “Avangate B.V.” as your Power Affiliate or contact your account manager for access.

Smarter Payments – Control and Personalize Consumer Experiences

Providing your customers with a personalized buying experience is now easier than ever with Avangate’s new monitoring and tracking tools. These tools enable you to better understand, predict, and control the hows and whys “behind the buy.”

API Enhancements

The latest Avangate API enhancements simplify API use and offer greater predictability. Be a part of the evolution of the Avangate APIs and try out API version 2.5.

• API version 2.5: The latest Avangate API release is organized around REST. Designed to use HTTP features and verbs, API v2.5 makes it easier than ever to create custom eCommerce experiences for your customers.
• More functionality: In addition to the REST design, version 2.5 of the Avangate API expands the platform’s functionality for:

1. Trials
2. Coupons
3. Antifraud capabilities
4. Cross-sell campaigns
5. Additional payment methods

With this new API version, you need only a single call to place an order after authentication.

• myAccount API: as of Fall ’14, the Avangate API has been extended to also cover myAccount, Avangate’s complete shopper portal that’s available to all of your customers.

Avangate is committed to keeping our API functionality compatible with previous releases. However, it’s highly recommended to transition to the latest version to benefit from the newest features and functionality.

Better Integration – Web Analytics And Salesforce.com

Avangate has made it easier than ever to monitor your customers, sales and conversion rate, regardless of your cart’s domain or whether you use Google Analytics or universal analytics, with advanced enhancements to our web analytics functionality and Salesforce connectivity.

The latest enhancements introduced to third-party tools integrating with the Avangate system enable you to:

• Streamline the use of tracking code in your shopping cart, not only in scenarios in which you’re using the Avangate domain with Google Analytics, but also:

1. Avangate domain (secure.avangate.com) and Universal Analytics.
2. Custom domain (store.mysite.com) and Google Analytics.
3. Custom domain (store.mysite.com) and Universal Analytics.

• We’ve adapted the Avangate Salesforce Connector (SFDC) to make the most of the latest Salesforce API release. After the introduction of version 31.0 of the Salesforce API, we enhanced the Avangate Salesforce Connector to insure all your sales data is available in Salesforce when you need it. Avangate’s integration with Salesforce expands the data portability in the Avangate platform, streamlining the availability of order, customer and subscription information for your accounts in Salesforce.

Join the Avangate Early Adopter Program!

The Avangate Early Adopter program was designed to give you an inside look at our newest features, before anyone else, suggest improvements and provide valuable feedback for future product developments. Plus, you will get the opportunity to work with the Avangate Product team! Interested? Join the program!

Register for the Fall Release Demo Webinars

Join our webinars to learn the benefits and how-to’s behind the Avangate Fall ’14 Release and ask questions regarding future updates.

Learn how to get the most out of the newly introduced and enhanced features and how you can apply them to your business to improve the shopper experience.

Register and reserve your seat now:

• Register for North America / LATAM – Nov 12, 10:00 AM PST
• Register for Europe / APAC /CIS – Nov 12, 10:00 AM GMT