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How to use NetLicensing with subscription management services

Question

I’m using PayPal Subscriptions to sell my product. How NetLicensing can improve my current license acquisition flow?

Answer

PayPal Subscriptions, as well as other Subscription Management Services (Paddle, Billwerk, Chargebee, Authorize.Net, 2checkout, Recurly, …) and eCommerce platforms (WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopify, …) are great tools to sell your digital products and services. These services offer a perfect customer eCommerce experience and cover standard shopping processes:

  • shopping cart
  • checkout
  • payment methods
  • billing & invoicing
  • recurring payments

So, you can easily set up your products and sell them online.

Extended licensing flow with NetLicensing

The license enforcement, however, and instant verification of customers’ entitlements usually needs to be implemented on your side. This is especially true for more complex scenarios than simple recurring subscriptions, e.g.:

  • customer acquired two “1-month” subscription licenses
  • the trial period needs to be extended for your “best” leads or prospects
  • additionally to the service subscription, a vendor using metered models, such as Floating, Pay-per-Use
  • service usage quota or additional up-sell features need to be assigned to the customer
  • … and the list of the different licensing strategies can go on

All these above concerns can be perfectly covered using NetLicensing services in addition to the standard license acquisition and renewal flow.

Digital fulfilment

In most of the eCommerce systems, a “digital fulfilment” step can be configured using custom webhook/IPN endpoint. NetLicensing can be hocked at that step and will be instantly notified on all or selected events in the eCommerce platforms.

Available events and their names differ from one system to another, however, notable events and corresponding NetLicensing action summarized below:

Webhook event NetLicensing action
Customer created Create a new customer
Subscription created Create and assign a license to the customer
Subscription renewed Create and assign an additional license to the customer
Subscription cancelled Deactivate customer’s license
Subscription updated Update customer’s license
Invoice Overdue Deactivate customer’s license

Digital fulfilment process with NetLicensing Gateway

NetLicensing Gateway is an open-source component, which is being used to maintain eCommerce integrations with NetLicensing core services.

One central instance of the NetLicensing Gateway is hosted and maintained on NetLicensing infrastructure. You can deploy your local instance on your own infrastructure, however.

Contribution

Being an open-source project, NetLicensing Gateway is maintained by our awesome community. New integrations can be implemented and approved after verification by NetLicensing team via GitHub Pull Request.