Not a good solution for B2C subscriptions.
Updated September 30, 2015
Not a good solution for B2C subscriptions.

Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Zuora Z-Business
Pros
- Managing recurring billing schedules.
- Storing credit cards and customer information.
Cons
- Reporting is really poor. You can run data dumps. I wouldn't call them reports. Your only option is to kick out a csv with unsummarized data for your subscriptions. There are no dashboards or summary figures. If you want to know how many New, Active or Cancelled subscriptions you had in a given period, you'll need to export a csv and do it yourself in Excel. You can't schedule reports to run, and you can't email reports from the interface.
- No HTML emails to customers. Everything sent to a customer is a text email. You're not even able to put a logo in the email. This triggers all manner of email deliverability flags and users have responded that they don't trust that the emails are from a reputable source.
- No Dunning Management (Delinquent User Notification). You can't set resolutions that automatically occur when a problem happens on a subscription. For example, if a customer's credit card fails three times, you might want to cancel that user's account automatically. This is a custom development job.
- Hard to integrate. No Python support and mostly SOAP API based. They started on a REST API in summer 2013 but it's not fully baked. My developers absolutely hate working with it and I know enough to know that they're not just grousing.
- Zuora does not provide a method for generating coupon or discount codes, or limiting the use of codes to certain products.
- Zuora doesn't provide a way to check system status. Most SAAS platforms have a status.XXX.com page where you can see if they are experiencing difficulties. When Zuora has an outage, which is not uncommon, their only communication channel is a forum on their support portal.
- The data model is excessively complex. Zuora bills this as "ultimate flexibility" , but when your developer has to make 12 API calls to get from a user to the amount they paid on an invoice, it's too much.
- Poor user experience. The interface is slow and needs a major design upgrade.
- Hard to add PayPal as a payment type.
- Building anything on top of Zuora has been time consuming and drawn resources away from our core business objectives.
Using Zuora Z-Business
Evaluating Zuora Z-Business and Competitors
Zuora Z-Business Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Using Zuora Z-Business
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
None | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Requires technical support Not well integrated Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn |
- Generating reports
- Adding discount codes
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation