PRODUCT

SOLUTIONS

CHARGEBEE RETENTION

Sharetribe is a SaaS company that lets entrepreneurs start an online marketplace, easily. What began as a university project for founders Antti and Juho, became a marketplace business. Soon, other entrepreneurs began approaching them for their marketplace platform. Realising the need for a marketplace platform, they pivoted into a what is today Sharetribe.

They charge a subscription fee on a monthly basis for their product.

The Challenge

Sharetribe invoiced their first few local customers through their accounting office, manually. Their first international customers were invoiced via PayPal but this process was still manual.But they realised this solution could not scale. Not to mention their hatred for manual work. Also, as a growing SaaS company, it was important to keep track of payments and their metrics.

But since their data was split across spreadsheets, payment tools and accounting system, it was difficult for them to crunch these numbers.

Another problem they often ran into was reminding their clients to pay. Chasing payments manually was a pain.

Finding Chargebee

Sharetribe decided to move past their clunky combination of spreadsheets, tools and accounting system and began hunting for a billing solution that could help them do all of this and give them a snapshot into their business's health.

We were exploring a few other options and of all Chargebee seemed like a good choice w.r.t product, services and pricing.

Antti

Co-Founder & COO, Sharetribe

Integration Process

Sharetribe went with a very lightweight integration to get started quickly. They set up plans within Chargebee and used the plan specific hosted page URLs to send it out to their customers.

After a couple of years, they switched to a slightly deeper integration to process subscriptions automatically.

Problems that Chargebee solved

Switching to Chargebee worked out for their billing operations and helped them tackle all their payment related scenarios. Here are a few problems that Chargebee solved for them:

Automatic Invoicing & payment collection
Sharetribe doesn't have any manual work anymore. With the entire subscription process from payment collection to the invoicing automated, they spend more time focusing on their business.
Dunning and automatic payment retry
Automatic recovery of failed payments has been really useful for them. Earlier, they had to manually chase payments that failed but now it's all part of a well oiled process, which helps Sharetribe recover lost revenue.
EU VAT
While all their peer businesses in EU were trying to handle EU VAT, Sharetribe faced no such problem. Chargebee's EU VAT integration saved a lot of overhead and time.
SaaS Metrics dashboard
A single source of truth for all our metrics is a huge win for us. This is crucial for us as a growing business

Antti

Co-Founder & COO, Sharetribe

Teams in Sharetribe that use Chargebee

The Support team uses Chargebee to refund and change subscriptions. They also use it to extend trials.

For the marketing team, looking at data on the metrics dashboard especially MRR helps them stay on track with their goals. They also look into pricing experiments and measure how that has impacted their business using Chargebee.

Founding team uses Chargebee as a source of truth for their business's health.

Results they've seen

Pricing Experiments
Pricing iterations have become easier. Especially grandfathering prices by keeping old customers on old plans, and new ones on new plans is quite easy now.
Better Insights
With Chargebee we're able to get a quicker idea of the direction we're headed in. For any company this is mandatory.
Focus on product
Chargebee has given us a clear focus on making our product better as a platform for starting a marketplace. The solution has been really flexible and helps us experiment faster.

Antti

Co-Founder & COO, Sharetribe

Smart teams like Sharetribe use Chargebee for their SaaS billing, without having to reinvent the wheel. Sign up for a free trial with Chargebee and explore what it can do for your business.

Try Sharetribe to build your marketplace website and launch quickly.