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

Not a good solution for B2C subscriptions.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zuora Z-Business

  • Managing recurring billing schedules.
  • Storing credit cards and customer information.
  • 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.
Zuora has a lot of great features for B2B companies that have it integrated with Salesforce. We've really struggled to make it work in a B2C environment. Some B2C examples where it falls short:
  • Zero tools to help recover stale or reissued credit cards. Subscription is all about reducing churn, especially in B2C. Visa and Mastercard allow merchants to update their credit cards on file using APIs , yet Zuora doesn't provide an interface to these programs. Also the retry logic and error handling on credit cards is very basic.
  • No HTML emails to customers.
  • Zuora doesn't offer an easy way to give customers the ability to manage their own upgrades and downgrades. I have to build something from scratch using their overly complex APIs. Other vendors offer account management widgets that let customers self-serve.
I'm planning on moving to Recurly, Vindicia or Braintree as soon as possible. If you're looking for a lean, easy to use solution to help with managing products, customers and recurring billing, look elsewhere.

Using Zuora Z-Business

There are other B2C subscription management products in the market that are more powerful, easier to use and have a lower cost of ownership.

Evaluating Zuora Z-Business and Competitors

Zuora Z-Business Implementation

Using Zuora Z-Business

ProsCons
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

Zuora Z-Business Reliability

Searching for a subscription record or invoice takes over 30 seconds and often times out.