Subscription Dashboard Reporting

• MRR and ARR Calculation: Previously, upgrades, downgrades, and add-ons were occasionally not tracked or handled correctly in subscription reporting. These issues have been addressed and now, calculations will be more correct going forward.

What changes should I see in my store?

• If you are a heavy user of upgrades, downgrades, or add-ons, you may see your MRR and ARR fluctuate slightly resulting from the updated calculations. These calculations are more accurate than previous reporting with the identified fixes. If you still have questions, please reach out to [email protected].
• Historic MRR Changes: Previously, we used deactivate dates to check for cancelation dates and would then remove MRR contributions, which had the unintended side-effect of altering historic MRR values. To solve this, we have improved our our analytics to capture cancellation events on the day of cancelation and remove MRR contribution at that time.

Example of Changes

• Let's take an example of an annual subscription activated in January 2023, cancelled in May 2023, and then deactivated in December 2023. Our previous MRR contribution calculation would not have changed until December 2023, potentially altering the MRR contribution for the period of May to December of 2023.
• Now, with the dates in the above example, our calculation immediately removes the MRR contribution from the subscription starting at cancellation in May of 2023 resulting in more accurate MRR change calculation.

What changes should I see in my store?

• For some sellers, this may cause a slight increase in cancellation counts and a decrease in MRR for active customers and subscriptions. If you have questions about this reporting, please reach out to [email protected].

• Fixed an issue in which quote prices were incorrectly displayed after clicking the “Accept and Continue” button in some cases.
• Fixed an issue in which a subscription cancellation would occasionally trigger two subscription update emails.
• Fixed an issue in which some Australian orders were missing the street name in the buyer address.
• Fixed an issue in which some buyers weren’t receiving an order invoice for monthly subscriptions.
• Fixed an issue in which Digital Invoicing was not accepting valid VAT IDs from some orders in the Czech Republic.
• Fixed an issue in which some trial dates were missing in the shopping cart when a coupon was applied to a subscription.

• Improved on custom attributes for products to more accurately reflect changes from one product to another when a plan change happens.
• Added a new field in return.created webhook events to distinguish between a full and partial refund at the item level to improve ease of comparing total price vs. total price returned.

New Welcome Dashboard and Onboarding Experience for Free Trials

In an effort to improve the onboarding experience of new sellers and to deliver more valuable information to our existing sellers, we’ve launched a new version of our welcome dashboard. With this launch, we’ve created two new widgets to better help sellers understand the value FastSpring delivers from day one.

First, we have enabled Checkout Preview which, with branding and localization customization, you’ll be able to see what your checkout can look like with FastSpring right from our dashboard.

Second, we’ve enabled our Total Cost of Ownership Calculator. With this calculator, you’ll be able to better understand how FastSpring saves you money in comparison to other DIY providers like Stripe. We encourage you to take a look and reach out to our sales team to better understand exactly how we can help your business save money.

Beyond these two widgets, we’ve also added blocks to provide additional valuable information such as: new product updates, customer stories, thought leadership, developer documentation and much more.

New and Improved Webhook Status Reporting

As we go into 2023, we are striving to deliver improvements to make our platform more developer friendly. To this end, we’ve released a new Webhook Log which displays rich information for each of your webhook events. Now, understand which webhook events belong to, what ID it’s associated with, how many attempts were made, and much more right from the FastSpring platform.

Not only will you get an overview, but you’ll also be able to view detailed information about the event, including its JSON payload and response history. Further, you can filter out certain webhooks based on criteria like event type, status, creation date, and more to better streamline your review of each webhook you’re using.

Want to know more? Check out our documentation here.

Collect Payments through True ACH Transfers

A vital part of any B2B transaction, FastSpring now fully supports ACH transactions for all of its sellers. Purchasers in the US or Canada can leverage ACH not only for one-time transactions, but also for rebills such as subscriptions.

Take a look at our docs to learn more about this exceptional payment method.

• Fixed an issue with quote pricing incorrectly displaying without VAT included.
  Improved subscription API functionality.
• Fixed some display issues with certain web browsers.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an api bug to create a new account accurately when using an old/already updated email address.
• Fixed an issue in which VAT was being deducted twice from the total amount in checkout when using the India Rupee.
• Fixed an issue in which activated subscription emails were displaying the incorrect date.
• Fixed an issue to send customer emails to the updated email instead of the email provided at checkout when a customer updates their email.
• Fixed an issue in which quotes were not changing status after their expiration date.
• Corrected calculations for volume discounts in NET stores in non-USD currency.
• Fixed a display issue in free trial with manual renewal in which taxes weren’t being shown on the invoice and order detail page.
• Updated the account management portal to accurately show prices for free and paid trials.
• Updated checkout to show total price including taxes and product price accurately in certain edge cases.
• Due to a recent change with our payment processors’ banking partner, we can no longer support AUD wire. We will, however, support wires from - Australia as long as they are not in AUD.
• Added support to redirect to a different dashboard for the platform landing page.

Reporting and Analytics:

We have officially launched our new Reporting and Analytics Dashboards and new Data API! Now, FastSpring offers two new dedicated Dashboards: Revenue Overview and Subscription Overview in addition to a new Data API. With our new Dashboards you now have the ability to quickly analyze sales by product, country, or coupon, uncover drivers of MRR trends, track churn more closely, and understand customer lifetime value behavior at a glance. With the new Data API you can programmatically pull data into your internal data warehouse and leverage your reporting tool of choice.

For more information, check out our product page and documentation for both the Dashboards and API.

Embedded Checkout:

Embedded Checkout is live for all FastSpring sellers! Now, sellers have the ability to add an inline checkout experience to product or pricing pages or your subscription sign-up page. We’ve also added deeper branding support with CSS overrides. CSS overrides can be enabled upon request from [email protected].

Documentation around our Embedded Checkout capabilities is available here. We’ve also updated our checkout overview on our website and highly recommend you go take a look here!

Trial Without Payment:

Free trials are a key customer acquisition strategy and FastSpring continues to iterate on our ability to support free trials, including trials without the need for an upfront payment method. To better support buyer and seller workflows, we now have the ability to Reactivate inactive subscriptions directly within the platform. Now, there’s no need for a buyer to create a new ticket to continue their subscription. Instead, they can do it directly from the Account Management Portal at any time.

You can find specifics of how to set up a free trial without payment required here. If you have questions around our subscription capabilities, we’ve got all you need to know here.

Canada Tax Regulation

Whenever it comes to the ever-changing world of global taxes, we have you covered. We’ve recently made a few changes to ensure compliance with updated tax regulations in Canada. Specifically, FastSpring has updated its systems to accurately reflect GST/HST for all applicable products and subscriptions in Canada. As a part of that, we have updated our systems to collect zip/postal codes from all orders in Canada. It is now required for all Canadian purchasers to provide a zip code in the checkout.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where certain checkout sessions produced a “Validation Failed” error when quote was selected as the payment method.
• Fixed an issue with SEPA payment method where fulfillment was sometimes triggered before the order was complete.
• Fixed an issue with SBL where an invalid zip code returned an error for certain checkout sessions.
• Replaced “$0.00” with “Free” in the checkout for certain countries.
• Fixed an issue in which buyers were receiving duplicate order and subscription emails.
• Clarified subscription language in the Account Management portal.
• Fixed an error in which the “Real-time” and NACHA checkboxes weren’t being displayed in some cases.
• Updated buyer sessions quote payment method for Net Mode.
• Resolved an issue to ensure accurate completion of iDeal orders.
• Optimized subscription tools to ensure accurate billing and subscription end dates.
• Resolved an issue with rebilling to ensure that auto-renew occurs as intended.
• Resolved a display issue with the subscription.charge.completed webhook when a rebill wax completed.
• Fixed invoices and quotes to ensure that all fields display as intended.
• Fixed an issue in which volume discounts were not carried over when quantities were changed via API.
• New alert information was added for specific payments to clarify the non-real-time nature of the transaction.

Checkout Flows:

As we continue to optimize our checkout experiences, we have cleaned up duplicate code to ensure that we can deliver an exceptional checkout experience for current and future checkout features. We have also added the ability for buyers to enter a custom amount for purchase of an item or to use the + and - buttons to increase or decrease quantity. This ensures that buyers with larger orders can easily convert with their desired amount of items purchased.

Trial With and Without Payment:

In the months since we released Trial Without Payment, we continue to optimize and add new features to ensure that sellers have the best experience when creating free trials on the FastSpring platform. To support this, we have made the following changes:

Free Trials:

• Added support for sellers to run free trial transactions in test mode.
• Updated the CTA button to say “Start Free Trial”
• Added the ability for buyers to pay now or pay later in the account management portal during the trial period.
• Updated notification to include both buyer and seller when a free trial is started.
  Fixed an issue in which sellers were able to add a free trial under subscriptions that required a one-time setup fee.
• Updated our web storefront to ensure that when using a free trial in web storefront, buyers aren’t asked to save payment information.
• Updated free trials to ensure that buyers can easily update their payment information in the account management portal when moving to a paid trial.

Paid Trials:

• Optimized configurations to clarify the price of a paid trial when that trial is greater than zero.
• Changed display language for when a coupon would decrease the price of a paid trial to less than zero to say “Free”

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug in Popup checkout where cart quantity modifications were unlocked for products that were quantity locked.
• Cleaned up our pricing code to support more VAT use cases when stores are in NET mode and utilize our volume discounts.
• Clarified our Postal Code collection field for Canadian buyers. Previously we asked for "zip code" and now we ask for "postal code".
• Fixed a bug where the quantity field for custom order items was too small.
• Fixed a bug in which the state/region field was blank when copying an order to a new custom order.
• Fixed a bug where Digital Invoicing Quotes were displaying incorrect values after the trial period.
• Fixed a bug for very rare cases in which coupons were deducted from quotes twice.
• Fixed a bug where Tax Exemption ID wouldn't show on invoices for some orders.
• Fixed a bug for certain transactions where orders were attributed incorrectly to the wrong seller.
• Fixed a pricing bug affecting certain German transactions processed in USD.
• Fixed a bug where some renewal dates in the AM portal were displayed incorrectly.
• Fixed a bug causing certain Store Builder Library (SBL) payloads to throw an address validation error.
• Fixed a bug with NPE when triggering webhooks for API quotes.
• Fixed a bug within webhooks regarding tax calculation.
• Fixed a bug in which a 500 internal server error was returned when a POST call with a nonexistent subscription ID was called.
• Fixed a bug where the “Pay Now” button was incorrectly displaying VAT/Tax calculations in the account management portal with certain subscriptions.
• Fixed a bug in the Popup checkout where the Continue and Download button settings were not being applied.
• Fixed a bug in which the “Gift Purchase” checkbox was displayed incorrectly in certain subscription trial conversions.
• Fixed a bug for very rare cases in which Account Management was incorrectly handling taxes.