Cratejoy is an online subscription billing solution that provides clients with features such as a website builder to create a subscription store, flexible product options, customer accounts, and inventory management. In addition to the traditional subscription billing and eCommerce features, Cratejoy also provides search engine optimization, email and social media marketing, and robust diverse analytics reporting.
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PayPal Enterprise Payments
Score 7.6 out of 10
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PayPal Enterprise Payments, formerly Braintree, is a billing platform which stores credit card data directly from the merchant’s systems on secure servers, and it allows for cards to be recharged or refunded. It also supports international payments.
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Recharge
Score 6.8 out of 10
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ReCharge, the eponymous subscription management software solution from ReCharge Payments headquartered in Santa Monica, is said by the vendor to have helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription business. Be it a curated monthly box, recurring necessities or access to exclusive perks, they state ReCharge drives billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers.
I will not recommend Cratejoy to anyone I know because I had a very poor experience with them. Initially, in my research, I had contacted Cratejoy to understand their platform more. I was led to believe that selling on their 'marketplace' would allow me to take advantage of a lower selling fee. We discussed how I would set up my shop and they assured me that it was done correctly so I would pay the lower amount. It took me over a year to realize I was paying the higher fee, which is about 10 times higher than the lower one. Fees are not listed anywhere in the Cratejoy administrative panels. They are not being emailed and there is no information about them anywhere UNLESS you think to go into your payment processor and look at individual transactions. Clearly, it's my responsibility to look at these things and see why the math is not adding up. However, at the time I signed up this information was not clear and I was given incorrect answers to my questions. I was operating on an assumption that took me a long time to realize and ended up costing me thousands in fees.
Braintree is a lower cost alternative to many of the options business owners have through their bank. However, they will need to be techy or be working with a developer to set up. The setup and backend isn't as user friendly as alternatives. Braintree is a great option if you'll need to manually type in credit card details. Banks will sometimes charge a lot more for that option. The manual option is nice if your clients aren't as tech savvy and prefer to pay over the phone than to pay on your website.
If you are using Shopify and have plenty of ecommerce orders a month, Recharge is a no brainer when it comes to setting up and using a subscription service. We can't say enough about how well their team works and implements everything along the way. They also teach us common practice things to set up in the admin for customers to use, and help us with reporting and analysis to get better and grow.
Braintree has excellent integration with the BigCommerce platform. The switch of our previous payment processing gateway to Braintree was very easy and only required a few clicks.
Tying into Braintree's BigCommerce integration, for company's like ours that are on the BigCommerce enterprise plan, Braintree's rates for BigCommerce enterprise customers are extremely competitive and saved us money.
Braintree has a pretty easy to use portal that can be accessed through the same login we use for PayPal which we are using in conjunction with Braintree with ease.
I've only had to call Braintree twice and my customer service issues were handled extremely quickly and easily.
As a product, functionality has been fine for us. In our experience, some issues during On Boarding but because we had a dedicated Account Manager assigned to us, these issues were dealt with. Now we are a customer, it feels like they have stopped caring about us or aren't interested in working with us to resolve any issues we have.
In my experience, Recharge is very slow loading, both for our customer facing dashboards and our internal dashboards. We regularly deal with customer complaints, having difficulty using their subscription management dashboard. Working in the Recharge admin dashboard is also slow and clunky. It can be a little bit of a battle to get stuff done and it's not uncommon for analytics dashboards to simply fail to load. All in all, working with Recharge is not an enjoyable experience for me.
Whether it be their upper management or their customer support crew, they have always acted and treated me like they care. Probably because we make them a lot of money, but nonetheless they do a great job whenever any issue comes up. I even met them in person!
Their support is a joke. There's nothing "supportive" about them. Every time I call in with an issue no one has an answer or even a recommendation. I am put on hold and no one ever comes back. It's time to find another processor.
In my experience, Recharge support is... quite poor. They are slow to respond and unhelpful. Even at a different brand I worked at with an Enterprise contract and guaranteed few hour response times, they would regularly take one to three days to get back to me, which is quite a bit longer than the Enterprise support response times. I've had to get into arguments with them multiple times about bugs before they would admit them to be bugs and fix them and their go to support is to usually blame Shopify. There was one time I accidentally sent an email to a different vendor asking about Recharge support, and the other vendor provided a more helpful response than Recharge support.
Braintree is better at handling international payments and supporting a variety of payment methods that can all be configured from the same dashboard. Braintree supports PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. in addition to simply credit cards like Stripe. Braintree has a vault of existing user payment methods so the user doesn't have to re-enter their information each time.
We actually surveyed over a dozen potential Shopify subscription apps before we finally decided to settle on Recharge. Recharge is definitely not the cheapest, but they also weren't the most expensive, either. For the all of the features and technology they offer versus what they are charging, we found it to be extremely fair (and now well worth the price).
