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Here's my wish list for Spreedly. I know this is a lot of stuff, and I don't expect this would all get implemented. But these are all the things I've wished for in Spreedly.
1. The ability to give out promotional coupon codes that apply a discount for a specified time period. For example, enter "ABC123" as a coupon code, and get 50% off for your first 6 months.
2. The ability to comp a user (e.g. add free time to the end of their subscription) without deleting their credit card information. Currently, when I comp a user, it removes all traces of the fact that they are subscribed on a monthly basis. It sets their subscription type as a blank string. I may be mistaken, but I believe that when the compensated time is complete, they need to re-enter their credit card information for their monthly subscription to kick in again.
3. The ability for users to disable/enable automatic renewal of their subscription without having to purchase another subscription. Currently, if a user purchases a monthly subscription, then cancels automatic renewal, if they want to enable automatic renewal again, they need to purchase another monthly subscription. That 2nd purchase gets tacked on to the end of their time remaining, so that works fine. But it would be nice to toggle this without making them purchase another month.
4. Some more reports in the admin interface would be nice:
4a. The number of active and inactive subscriptions for each plan
4b. All transactions for any given month (or year, or week, or day)
4c. A summary of income for any given day, week, month, or year
5. Email me when there is an error with production site notification. There have been times where an error in my code has caused these push notifications to queue up on your end. It wasn't until a day or two later when I noticed that nobody's subscriptions were being updated that I went in and checked the status in my Spreedly page. At that time I saw that notifications have been queuing up. An email about failed notifications would be very helpful.
6. More control over the emails that get sent to my users from Spreedly. Currently, I'm not really sure what all is being sent to my users on my behalf. I would like to send notices about subscriptions expiring, but I don't want to duplicate messages so I have disabled many of these notices. Along the same lines, I'd like the ability to send emails using my email template with my logo. An idea I had for this is to mimic the callback functionality where you update subscriber information using a web service on my server. You could ping a separate web service on my server with information about predefined emails that need to be sent to a user. I can optionally implement that email and send it, or refuse to send it and you'd send it on my behalf.
I’m
happy
Create a customer community for your own organization
Plans starting at $19/month
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1I should have mentioned the reason for #2. I want to implement a referral system. If someone refers a friend, and that friend signs up and purchases a subscription, I want to comp that user for a free month. This could all be handled on my end if I had the ability to comp a user without removing their current subscription information. I just want it to tack a month on to the end of whatever time they have remaining, and at the end of that time, charge their card again like normal.Comment
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Also, more details for #1:
I'd like to create coupons and delete them or have them expire at any time. After I delete a coupon, people who used the coupon would still have its effects applied to their account, but no new users could use that coupon during checkout.
I imagine that a coupon would apply to a single plan. I have three plans: monthly, semiannual, and annual. So I could run the promotions: "Purchase an annual subscription and get 50% off your first year", "Purchase a monthly subscription and get your first month for $1" -
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Luke, this is great feedback. Some clarification, and a peek at what we have planned:
1. Coupons are a definite, though they're probably down the road a bit.
2. You uncovered a weakness in the comp'ing system that we hadn't realized was there. We're tackling it soonest, and will let you know when it's fixed. At that point your referral system should be straightforward to implement.
3. The reason that a customer currently has to re-subscribe if they turn off automatic renewal is that we only store their credit card info if they're automatically renewing. Sounds like that's confusing though, so we'll discuss lifting that restriction.
4. More stats are a definite, and will be sooner rather than later. Your ideas here on what would be useful will definitely feed in to our design.
5. Emailing you about notification failures is a great suggestion, and easy to do. Added to the list. We'll probably only send them if the failure persists (say for an hour) rather than on the first failure so that you don't get one every time you deploy or there's a connection hiccup.
6. We just added a listing of emails currently sent by Spreedly to the Integration Reference: http://spreedly.com/integration-refer.... We definitely want to have more robust support for communications with subscribers, and your suggestion of a callback service is intriguing.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up! It's *really* helpful. -
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I’m
satisfied
Thanks! I'm excited about the future of Spreedly. Keep up the great work.
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I’m
happy
It might be worth noting that if we are going to be notified about failures of notifications (#5), we could do with the ability to cancel the notifications. I am developing the payment part of my app locally, so the notifications are never going to reach their destination... unless I am missing something. -
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EMPLOYEE
I’m
confident
We'll make sure that if you don't specify a notification URL in your test site, we won't tell you it's not working. That said, a lot of folks expose a public url on their dev and/or staging box when they're doing their initial integration just to make sure it works end-to-end. -
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EMPLOYEE
I’m
excited
FYI, #5 "Email me when there is an error with production site notification" is now up and running. You can read all about it on the blog: http://blog.spreedly.com/2009/8/8/cal...
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Thanks Nathaniel, keep up the great work!
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1Has any work been done on promo codes? I would love to be able to offer promo codes this Christmas season to help promote my site with some special offers.
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EMPLOYEE
I’m
wishing I had better news to report
Sorry Luke, we haven't done any work on promo codes yet. Based on the list of things on our docket, I'd be pretty surprised if we've got them by Christmas. -
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I’m
one of those types of customers who is put off when I see a coupon code field and don't have one...
Duff, just saw something to consider when implementing coupons (from Jakob Nielson's Alertbox: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/short-t...)
"Instead of using coupon codes, encode offers in special links embedded in your email newsletters and automatically transfer the coupon to the user's shopping cart. This has two benefits...
It eliminates the "enter coupon code" field, which scares away shoppers who don't have coupons (and who refuse to pay full price when the checkout flow blatantly signals that other users are getting a better deal)."
http://screencast.com/t/NjlkYTYxNGU-
I'm also at a minimum distracted when I see a coupon code field, so this is a fantastic suggestion. We'll mull on how best to implement it, but I really appreciate the pointer.
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But don't you think that a coupon code field also encourages people to think about and possibly promote specials that you are running?- view 1 more comment
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It's never had that effect on me - I always just think "argh, there's a coupon out there and I don't have it!"
Of course, our designer may have other thoughts, but it's good to think about alternatives to the status quo. -
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You know, that's a very good point. Now that I think about it, I have the exact same thought whenever I see a blank "coupon code" box. The first thing I do is google for coupon codes for that product and try and find one that works.
I do like the idea of special links. Or perhaps this can be handled through the API by letting me pass in a coupon code to spreedly, but otherwise not displaying it. That would allow me to handle coupon codes however I want on my site. I could embed them in links to my website, or I could prompt the user for the coupon code before they go to the spreedly payment page. That might be the most flexible option. -
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I don't see anything in the FAQ about support for coupon codes or being able to comp users. Are these available yet?-
You can absolutely comp users, both via the admin interface and via the API. We don't have built-in coupon support, but you can use the Add Credit API to implement coupons by adding credit to a subscriber when they redeem a coupon on your site.
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I’m
curious
1What is the rationale/delay in providing coupon codes as a feature during the payment collection stage of Spreedly ? Is this ever going to be available ? We need this right now !! :) -
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Coupons are definite goal, but other things are keeping us busy and we just haven't had a chance to add them. If they're a must-have for you (and the Add Credit API isn't a good stand-in) then we're probably not a good fit for the next six months or so.
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I’m
sad
Ugh, we went with chargify because we need coupons/discounts but they aren't working out for other reasons. If something simple like "apply discount to first payment" was available then I wouldn't have to write a billing system next month.
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The use case of "apply discount to first payment" is actually pretty easy with Spreedly - just use the Add Credit API to give them credit equivalent to the discount you want to provide:
https://spreedly.com/manual/integrati...
Will that work for your needs? -
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So add the credit first then subscribe them to a plan will produce a single invoice and transaction. That's more work for us but less than a complete billing system. I need to walk through your API don't I.
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