“With billing decisions, it is so fundamentally important to get it right.” – Will Seippel, CEO and Co-Founder of WorthPoint

Company:
WorthPoint
Industry:
Consumer Goods / Retail, Media / Publishing
The Customer

WorthPoint is the largest resource for identifying, researching and valuing antiques, art, and vintage collectibles.

The Challenge

They started with their own billing system, but knew they needed greater support to shift into a recurring billing model.

The Solution

After initially going with a limited billing solution—and suffering the consequences—they implemented Zuora in 2014 as their subscription management platform and strategic partner.

The Benefits

WorthPoint grew revenues almost 40% in one year—and were equipped to handle this exponential growth—with the support of Zuora.

“We knew Zuora was the best solution for us, but we chose another company and that cost us dearly.”

WorthPoint is the “go-to” resource for collectors of all levels to find, value, and price anything. Founded in 2007, they originally built their business on a homegrown billing system, but realized early on that they had to go into recurring billing in order to grow.

As they made the shift to subscriptions, they sought out a subscription management platform. Initially they chose a billing service that turned out to be “a complete disaster,” according to Will Seippel, CEO and Co-Founder of WorthPoint.

Rather than helping WorthPoint get closer to their customers, the service got in the way. WorthPoint missed out on opportunities to sell into their customer base—and missed opportunities to hear from dissatisfied customers and provide necessary customer service. And cash was delayed by 2+ weeks because of disconnects between invoicing and collections.

The result? “We lost 40% of our business in the first month and almost went out of business,” says Seippel.

In 2014, they implemented Zuora…and haven’t looked back! Says Seippel: “Zuora is a wonderful product—everything they said that it would do, it did…and more!”

Specifically, WorthPoint relies on Zuora for:

  • Pricing and packaging: Zuora provides ease in using coupons and tracking promotions to help drive customer acquisition and upsells.
  • Billing expertise. With Zuora, WorthPoint is able to easily customize bills and reconcile billing periods. As Seippel notes, “With billing decisions, it is so fundamentally important to get it right.”
  • Reporting and subscription metrics. WorthPoint uses Zuora to research issues with customer revenue, compute billing stats like failure rates, and access key subscription metrics like average revenue per bill. “It’s easy to use, even for someone who’s not a programmer,” says Seippel, and yields valuable insights. For example, they recently discovered they were undercounting revenue, and are now reconciling their bank accounts with Zuora to remedy.
  • Global Support. Global Support is an essential resource. For example, when WorthPoint CFO Neal McAtee noticed that bill runs were noticeably lower than their monthly average, Zuora Global Support was able to troubleshoot and implement a quick fix that helped WorthPoint recapture $9,000.

With the upcoming launch of their fourth consumer product, WorthPoint Vault, WorthPoint needs to price and package a new consumer product as well as build out a new taxonomy to accommodate 1B images, 500M web pages, 300M unique visitors/month, and 15K+ paid users.

As Seippel notes, “all of this traffic takes us from being a simple company to manage, to one that is much more complex.”

Happily, WorthPoint recovered from their initial wrong billing decision and has hit its stride, growing revenues almost 40% from December 2017 to December 2018, with $400,000 in transaction volume per month being managed through Zuora.

As they reach cash flow positive, WorthPoint no longer has to worry about survival and can focus on “keep[ing] up with what we need to do as a company versus the cash regenerating,” according to Seippel.

WorthPoint grew revenues almost 40% from December 2017 to December 2018.

Zuora Global Support was able to troubleshoot and implement a quick fix to a bill run issue, helping WorthPoint recapture $9,000.

Highland News & Media