For over a decade we have empowered thousands of businesses to manage the recurring revenue lifecycle and have stayed at the forefront of SaaS billing. With the new Trial Subscription requirements Visa is rolling out tomorrow, April 18, 2020, we have made a few updates to ensure you stay aligned with Visa’s recommended best practices when offering trial and promotional subscriptions. Read below to learn how we are ensuring your business stays on top of these new updates.

Reminder of the purpose of Visa’s new industry recommended practices  

Visa is encouraging merchants to implement these new rules in order to enhance transaction disclosures, reduce chargebacks, and empower customers’ shopping experience when choosing to do business with a subscription-based merchant.

How is Maxio addressing Visa’s new recommendations ?

• Express Consent

  • Visa: Whenever a buyer is enrolling into a subscription trial or promotion, the Merchant should enable the ability to provide expressive consent to enter into an ongoing subscription service.

  • Maxio’s Support:  If a payment is expected after a trial period, you can configure your settings to make this change for your product price points and inform customers and gain their consent, more info here.

• Enhanced notifications

  • Visa: Visa has encouraged all merchants to provide a copy of the terms and conditions for the subscription service, which includes full detail of beginning and ending dates, confirmation of enrollment, upcoming billing cycles, and an easy cancellation link.

  • Additionally, the new Visa standards ask that merchants send an email notification with cancellation link, 7 days prior to the ending cycle of the trial period . This email notification also applies if anything changes on the recurring agreement.  

  • Chargify’s Support: Chargify has enabled new email notification settings and the ability to provide direct cancellation links.

    You can configure the number of days to send upcoming end-of-trial notification emails here. 

• Easier Cancellation

  • Visa: Visa is championing frictionless cancellation options for customers. 

  • Maxio’s Support: Maxio will enable all Merchants to provide a cancellation link that is accessible to Merchants who sign up for a subscription. Additionally, our team of experts highly recommend enabling cancellations via the Billing Portal to meet the Visa trial subscription standards.   More on the Billing Portal features and settings here.

• Explicit Transaction Receipts

  • Visa: Similar to the detail requested for enhanced notifications, transaction receipts will now require full details for a trial period, transaction amounts and dates, and as well as a cancellation link.

  • Maxio’s Support: Maxio has enabled the full detail requested for transaction receipts to ensure that your customers are given clear information on what they have enrolled into.  We recommend using our help documentation to test your communication before sending to your customers. You will find email templates related to trial related transaction receipts below: 

    • Signup Email

       

      template

    • Receipt Email

       

      template

    • End of Trial Email

       

      template

• Statement Descriptors

  • Visa: In addition to the descriptors already in place, a trial period-related transaction should be made in the Merchant Name field of the Clearing Record for the first transaction at the end of a trial period. This requirement has been pushed back to 17 April 2021, you can find more about this update here.

  • Maxio’s Support: Maxio will enable all gateways that support dynamic statement descriptors.  You can read more here

     

    on how to make sure that your customer’s first payment after an introductory offer is stated on the statement descriptor.  Please also make sure to check with your gateway to ensure dynamic descriptors are supported and enabled. We will keep our Merchants updated on the gateway status of these changes:

Your success is our priority and we will continue to monitor the constantly changing payments and gateway industry to ensure you have the tools needed to continue providing a great experience for your clients.

These new trial subscription updates that are championed by Visa are also a push toward enhancing the buying and selling experience for everyone by providing clarity, control, and easier dispute resolution.