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If you’re selling video games direct-to-consumer (DTC), there’s a good chance you may be taking advantage of a “merchant of record” payment platform like Xsolla and others. Merchants of Record are a great choice for video game companies because they allow you to offload the complexity of payments, fraud, global taxes, and more so you can spend your team’s time on making great games. But what happens if your Merchant of Record goes down, doesn’t meet your data compliance requirements for specific regions, or has less than ideal approval rates in a particular region? Is your business ready?
In this article, I’ll show why FastSpring is a great complementary solution to your existing MoR and how you can use MoR redundancy to ensure you get the best approval rates, competitive pricing, enhanced compliance, and the peace-of-mind that comes from having global active-active failover for your payments and subscriptions.
Reduce Downtime Risk
Sometimes, technical issues arise that create downtime for your primary payment provider. If this happens to you and you don’t have an active backup solution in place, transactions can come to a halt and cause havoc for your team having to deal with angry players in Discord, social media, and your support forums. By configuring FastSpring as an automated backup solution for your existing payment provider, you can rest assured that if there is a service disruption, you don’t have to risk a loss in revenue and a huge distraction for your business.
Improve Authorization Rates
While technical issues can cause downtime with your payment provider, you may also find that certain providers have better authorization rates than others for certain types of transactions. Having redundancy in your payment stack means you can also route certain transactions to the provider most likely to have the highest approval rates for those transactions. Thanks to the trust FastSpring has established with global payment processors, FastSpring boasts industry-leading approval rates around the world. This means that when a payment fails on your current MoR, the same payment can be tried through FastSpring’s systems thereby reducing the likelihood of a declined transaction and keeping your players happy.
Optimize Approval Rates by Region or Country
One of the most common differences in approval rates between providers can be within specific countries or regions. You can leverage FastSpring to get better approval rates in target regions, get access to new regions, or help route payments during an outage with a specific processor in a specific region.
Strengthen Your Data Compliance
If you’re selling your games in regions that require you to not store payment / player data in geographies outside those allowed in specific privacy regulations or in geographies affected by specific sanctions, you may find value in routing affected payments through an alternative MoR. FastSpring stores payments / player data in accordance with appropriate privacy regulations and sanctions. FastSpring is a safe choice for your most important payments & player data with registered entities in the US, Canada, UK, and The Netherlands.
Get the Best Approval Rates for You
In addition to routing payments to optimize for approval rates and to reduce downtime, having more than one payment provider also gives you the ability to route payments based on the transaction cost to you. FastSpring’s competitive rates as a merchant of record for global payment methods gives you an extra choice when optimizing your payment routing.
Optimize Payment Rebills
An unavoidable fact of collecting payments is that sometimes, they’ll fail. It could be because there’s an issue with the bank’s system, or the processor is struggling with validation. Whatever the case, it’s essential to have a partner with built-in rebill tools to rescue potential lost revenue. FastSpring’s systems automatically retry failed payments and allow us to recoup an average of 16% of lost revenue across our clients. When operating at the scale of a game studio, that revenue can represent a huge sum.
Hedge Transaction Volumes for Major Launches
The worst outcome during the launch of a new game, season, or DLC is missing out on revenue because of increased transaction volume. When you’re in the middle of a new launch, FastSpring can step up as a backup option. Or you can proactively route partial volume through FastSpring to ease the load on your current payment solutions to keep your big launch from falling on its face.
At the end of the day, game studios that leverage FastSpring in addition to their existing merchant of record enhance their payments stack with improved authorization rates, rebills to rescue revenue, reduced downtime risk, and true active-active geographic redundancy.
Read more about how FastSpring supports game studios, or Sign up for a demo. Also, take a look at how FastSpring helped Out of the Park Developments increase revenue in South Korea.
