Subscription eCommerce for Services, Digital, & Physical Goods

Subscription eCommerce for Services

Online subscription services are probably the most common form of this type of eCommerce. Examples of widely available services that fit into this category are web hosting, and email continuity. That is because it is generally simple to keep track of online sales, and activating and deactivating such services at will is a matter of coding rather than involving personnel. However, service subscriptions are not limited to just online services. They can include anything that can be viewed as a service that regularly occurs over a given time period. Fitness classes, monthly spa membership, singing lessons are but a few of the myriad of possibilities. We can either create a custom solution or customize existing systems for our clients. In either case we generally integrate additional functionality that takes these systems to another level.

Subscription eCommerce for Physical Goods

This is now a rapidly growing part of eCommerce. Typically vendors bundle the price of a physical product, such as a phone, into their normal services billing cycle. Other vendors have very different business plans based on the price of goods in secondary markets when they are returned in good condition. For example, we have created a system for one of our clients, Cutting Edge Gamer LLC., that allows their customers to pay for high-end graphics cards on a monthly basis as a subscription. The client can then upgrade their graphics card by simply returning the one they currently have and updating their subscription accordingly.

Subscription eCommerce for Bookings and Membership

Booking a rehearsal studio, or meeting room on a regular basis does come under the umbrella of the term subscription eCommerce, but these systems also generally have Business to Business and Shopping Cart components so these really fall under all three categories. One of the very first systems we developed was for a spa where members paid a reduced fee for bookings compared with non-members.

Subscription eCommerce for Digital Goods & Processing

This could be as simple as selling individual song tracks as MP3s to complex licensing arrangements. There are many such solutions already in existence so we generally manage or integrate additional functionality into them. We are passionate about developing vendor-specific solutions that follow a pay-per-use model where the customer pays to electronically process some digital asset. A somewhat complex example that illustrates the capabilities of such systems is 3D printing where the customer uploads a data file that is processed by the printer and the resulting physical goods are sent back to the customer. A less complicated example may be the customer uploads a set of images and the system creates movies or converts the 2D images to 3D models and returns them to the customer. The possibilities are endless. The important idea here is that it is going to be nearly impossible for the code to be cracked because the end-user has no direct access to the code.

By Dr. Ataollah Etemadi