Controlling access has always been one of the difficult parts of selling subscriptions since you often need to know who is active and you need to maintain their subscription state often tied to their site credentials. This is true for website access (to premium content, support, upgrades, etc.) and for Software as Service/Hosted Applications.

There are two solutions for the user access - one is hosting your own database for user credentials and access and then pinging Reg.Net (using web services) to determine if someone has access to a particular resource. The account in this case lives in two locations (what we call shadow accounts). If the subscription state changes there are two options:

1. We modify the user's access record and when they next try to login you ping us to determine if they have access
2. We ping your server due to the change in subscription status and you update the flags on your side.

Another way is the usage of non-shadow accounts whereby the user creates their account on our servers as part of the subscription purchase. When they login, you pass to us and we determine if they have access and redirect them to the "real location" based on the state of their subscription record. This prevents you from having to maintain a user database at all but allows you to sell access to protected content in a turn key manner. We manage the user's account, including "forgotten password" functionality, all under your brand.

One important aspect of subscriptions is the need to keep the users account history. If they order something else, it is best to have some consolidated history.

For every subscription client, we assign them a unique ID for multiple purposes. We pass this back to the vendor post purchase (e-mail or XML posted to a server). This can be stored and passed into any future purchase which will tie to their existing account without them needing to login on our side and will also form fill to streamline the purchase process. It also allows the user to change any item (billing info, name, e-mail address) and their unique identifier remains.

Once a user is logged in you can present a "My Account" link with this unique ID where they are transferred to our server to view their account history, modify or update their billing data, print receipts, and cancel autorenewing subscriptions.

We support two types of subscriptions - manual and automated. A manual subscription can be used in the case of a customer who purchases 1 year of premium technical support. At the end of the year, their action is required to renew. The automated subscription (typically preferred) will autorenew unless the customer cancels.

We take care of sending the pre-bill e-mail reminders to increase customer satisfaction and to avoid billing disputes. We also manage declines by e-mailing the user and driving them back to the branded Account Management location to update their billing information and automatically retry to keep them on the subscription track.

Two approaches to subscriptions:

• Leave on unless told of a cancellation or subscription cancellation
• Turn off unless told of a new sale being processed

We support either model and using our flexible Event Notification system, vendors can be informed in real time to changes in subscription status as well as certain events like a sale, a refund, a chargeback, or a failed billing attempt.

Reporting is another important element related to subscriptions. By setting up two products for each subscription you are selling you can effectively track revenue from "subscription A - new subscriber" vs. "subscription A - renewal". These products are chained together from the initial purchase to the renewal purchase which is chained to itself.

In GAAP Accounting it is important to recognize revenue amortized over the life of the subscription. For example, if a customer purchases a $120 subscription, it is appropriate to account for $10 per month over the course or a year instead of $120 in the month in which the subscription was paid for. The Recognized Revenue Report does this for you and accounts for refunds and chargebacks.

Flexibility is important in subscriptions. We support free trials where the credit card is collected in advance as well as free trials where order data but not billing information is supplied. The initial signup can be more or less than the recurring fee. Recurring can any period of time: monthly, quarterly, annual or even unique timeframes like 3 weeks or 14 day trials.

Storing credit card data for the purposes of rebilling brings a whole new level of privacy and compliancy concerns. This is why we see an increasing number of companies contacting us for help and asking Reg.Net to manage their subscription business. As we are hosted in Digital River's world class data center with multiple levels of redundancy and 24x7 monitoring, customer's feel more comfortable knowing their data is secure and their privacy upheld.