Digital commerce payments are electronic payments, often made with real-time authorization, that are used to support digital commerce transactions. Digital commerce payment vendors combine a payment gateway, payment processing, acquiring services, payment security and fraud detection. Payment gateways initiate payments at the request of merchants and return the responses to those merchants. They offer preexisting connections and certified integrations with key payment acquirers and processors, and many have integrations with other providers in the greater digital commerce ecosystem. All digital commerce payment vendors offer a software as a service (SaaS) payment gateway at a minimum. Many are full-stack providers that include processing and acquiring capabilities, alternative payment methods, fraud detection, payment data tokenization, and other related or ancillary services.
A recurring billing application enables organizations to bill customers for one-time, subscription-based and usage-based fees for goods and services. It consumes orders and/or service contracts documenting the goods and services the customer has purchased, periodically generates fixed recurring fees, and ingests and rates product usage data. It issues one-time or periodic roll-up invoices to the customer and collects payments before determining recognizable revenue and posting to an external general ledger. APIs or UI fragments support a self-service billing portal. Modern recurring billing applications are an important customer touchpoint for measuring customer sentiment and for delivering marketing messaging. Recurring billing is mission-critical for invoicing customers and collecting revenue for a business. It ensures billing for all goods and services is aggregated into one periodic invoice to the customer. It enables value-based pricing models that are charged based on actual usage of the service. Payment can be automatically collected by a wide range of payment mechanisms. Dunning workflow optimizes the collection of failed or delinquent payments. Revenue recognition logic ensures adherence to the latest international standards such as IFRS 15 and ASC 606.