Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the workings of many industries from the insights gleaned from the collected data. Amplified Engineering is a revolutionary IoT gateway manufacturing firm based out of Perth, Australia. The Amplified Engineering team has been researching emerging trends in the IoT industry for more than 5 years, which helped them launch a new line of operations that's quite novel in the IoT world: offering IoT gateways for lease.

"Lean is the way to go. Today, we prefer agile processes because they allow us to pivot and respond to changes on the ground. Why should acquiring our hardware be different?" asked Timothy Heng, Marketing Manager of Amplified Engineering.

The Search

In addition to selling physical devices (gateways), Heng's team also offers monthly data packages. They decided that subscription-based pricing would fit their business model well and started looking for a subscription billing tool to help:

• 1. Trial management: Providing a 30-day free trial for all new customers.
• 2. Setup fee: Collecting a one-time setup fee for the initial installation.
• 3. Pro-rated billing: Allowing customers to upgrade or downgrade their plans any time and be charged the pro-rated amount automatically.
• 4. Consolidated billing: Giving customers with more than one subscription a single invoice each month, combining all their subscriptions.
• 5. PCI compliance: Collecting online payments securely.

We had these core requirements, and a few other items on our checklist while evaluating subscription billing tools. Zoho was the best in meeting all these.

- Timothy Heng, Marketing Manager, Amplified Engineering.

The Solution:

Heng and his team like to search for answers themselves before reaching out to support. Whenever they had doubts, the Zoho Subscriptions' help guide was their first go-to resource. "The help guides were well organized, and whenever we needed human assistance, the Zoho Subscriptions' support team was quick to respond," Heng said.

After setting up their products, plans, and add-ons, Heng's team customized Zoho Subscriptions to meet their exact needs—they configured the standard setup fee, consolidated billing (known as "group invoices" in Zoho Subscriptions), and trial management. And with that, Amplified Engineering was up and running and completely customized to meet their needs within a week.

Heng's team already had a merchant account with Stripe for their payment gateway, so they easily integrated it with Zoho Subscriptions to start collecting online payments. This is where they deployed PCI-DSS compliant hosted payment pages from Zoho Subscriptions

Once they handled both invoicing and payment collection, Heng wanted to ensure Amplified Engineering wouldn't lose customers because of declined payment. The dunning management built into Zoho Subscriptions solved this completely.

I was really impressed that the system could not only recover failed payments with multiple retry attempts, but also notify our customers about the failure so they could update their card details.

Zoho Subscriptions' Customer Portal is another favourite for Heng and his team. "The Customer Portal is very convenient for our customers. They can view all their subscriptions in one place and have a complete control over their expenditure," Heng said.

The Customer Portal helps Heng and his team to stay in touch with their customers and address concerns quickly, while the dunning management helps recover failed payments, boosting their retention rates.