Just when the world thought it was well provided for subscription commerce toolsets, OneBill is today launching its own take on this product area.

Subscription billing is a massive area of opportunity as organizations look to gain increased flexibility and agility when it comes to selling their products in new and creative ways. This opportunity has not gone unnoticed and there are a number of vendors who can roughly be split into those providing a comprehensive product set for top shelf customers (Zuora, Aria Systems, Vindicia etc) and those providing a more lightweight offering suitable for startups (Recurly, Chargify etc). OneBill’s take is slightly different in that they’re focusing on tight integration with social networking sites for their offering.

The idea behind OneBill Subscription Commerce is to provide an integrated subscription platform to manage a subscription services company’s core business functions by connecting internal departments from marketing, sales, operations, and technology to the provider’s external customers, influencers, and prospects. They do so by providing specific functionality to different departments;

Marketing:

  • The OneBill platform allows for the creation of unlimited pricing combinations, via the OneBill Pricing Designer
  • Integration with social commerce sites including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, SalesForce, Foursquare mean that OneBill customers can promote and sell service offerings
  • Marketers can analyze the business trends using OneBill Business Intelligence to recognize customers’ buying trends by optimizing revenue channels and ROI

Sales:

  • OneBill Order Manager converts quotes to contracts through integrated workflows
  • Interact with core corporate systems via OneBill Connectors

Operations:

  • The Customer Self Care portal within OneBill allows a company’s customers to manage their subscriptions, orders, invoices, payments, renewals

IT:

  • The OneBill platform is designed on an integrated SaaS delivery model
  • The OneBill platform integrates with provisioning and usage metering systems through OneBill platform’s connectors

MyPOV – OneBill is telling a good story but I’m really not seeing anything remarkable here – the previously mentioned subscription and billing vendors already do this stuff and have existing traction in the marketplace. I’m also not impressed by a vendor that launches themselves claiming to be the “first subscription commerce platform” – at best that’s wrong, at worst it’s a barefaced lie that does nothing for the credibility of OneBill itself or the industry as a whole.

I haven’t taken a deep dive with OneBill so can’t comment on specific functionality – but at this stage I’ll remain cautious about their ability to have much impact in the space.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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