Each year Wildside press releases several hundred paper books and uses PayWhirl’s automatic billing to offer memberships for the online Ebook club. From humble beginnings in 1989, Wildside Press began as a hobby and has since grown to be a full-time job for the publisher and four employees, with 15,000+ books in print and an online Ebook club.
Bringing new readers to older ebooks
Before signing up with PayWhirl, Wildside Press was looking for a way to bring new readers to their older ebooks and decided to try a subscription model on their eCommerce site. From that idea, the Black Cat Mystery and Science Fiction Ebook Club was born.
Each week, Black Cat releases a new mystery and science fiction ebook that is available free to all members. Most customers who enjoy what they read, purchase a paid membership at $3.99 per month or $19.99 billed yearly. Each membership tier includes 7+ free ebooks each week and a 20% discount on other Wildside Press ebooks.
Why PayWhirl?
Starting-out, Wildside Press’s owner entered all subscription data into a spreadsheet to track renewals manually. From the beginning, Wildside Press realized manually updating a spreadsheet became too cumbersome to manage payments. For this reason, they began looking for a payment management service that could do everything in one app.
Luckily for Wildside Press they found PayWhirl
PayWhirl answered every need. I haven’t had a second’s regret since signing up.
Wildside Press Owner
Wildside Press uses PayWhirl’s payment plans and pricing table widgets to offer customers the ability to check out for a monthly subscription or yearly renewal. Currently, they offer two payment plans (1 for monthly and another for yearly). They added the widget to a two-section pricing table widget.
PayWhirl’s pricing table widget gives Wildside Press the ability to offer two payment plans side-by-side and allow customers to select and checkout for one plan.
Like many PayWhirl customers, Wildside press not only uses PayWhirl for automatic billing and renewals. They also use PayWhirl’s integration with the groups feature in BigCommerce to grant access automatically to bcmystery.com an online eBook library they operate.
The groups feature in BigCommerce allows businesses to organize customers, provide discounts, and restrict access to specific products or categories. By connecting PayWhirl payment plans to groups in BigCommerce, customers that sign up to plans are granted access to Wildside Press’s eBook membership option.
PayWhirl manages all our subscriptions, and it grants (or removes) user access automatically to bcmystery.com as appropriate. Outsourcing our subscriptions has freed up many hours for me to do more editorial and production work.
Wildside Press Owner
Advice from Wildside Press’s Owner
Before signing up for PayWhirl, Wildside Press only used traditional eCommerce methods to allow customers to purchase Ebooks (one-time purchases). When they created their Black Car Mystery and Science Fiction, subscriptions it was completely new territory.
Don’t try to do it yourself. — find a service like PayWhirl that can do everything you want (and probably a few things you haven’t thought of). Chances are they’ll be faster, better, and cheaper. You can’t beat a dedicated subscription service.
WildSide Press
If you have any questions about automatic billing or other automated payment services, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re happy to help with any businesses needs related to payments or billing.
The PayWhirl Team
