"To refer or to embed". That is the question that our software partners regularly ask themselves (and us) when evaluating their partnership options. While we think that you know your product and customers best, we know that it's easier for both of us to start earning revenue by you simply referring your customers to us.
But since we're partners, we want what's best for you too.
Below are some of the reasons why we believe you can grow your company faster by embedding our widgets within your own merchant facing portals, rather than simply referring customers to us.
Reason 1: You have the ability to charge your customers the rate that you think is best for them. When referring your customers to us it's true that we'll give them a special rate so that you can provide extra value to them, however when you're embedding our widgets into your own application (without our branding visible) you can own the billing process and can charge your customers whatever rate you see fit. Whether you just want to cover your costs or make a big margin, the decision is up to you.
Reason 2: Your product becomes stickier. Every integration and feature that you add to your platform makes your product a bit tougher for merchants to leave you for a competitor's product. By embedding our widgets into your own application a merchant would need to not only find a replacement for your tech, but they'd also need to fill the void left by losing the ability to manage their online listings, get and monitor reviews, and sync menus if they wanted to leave. That makes it much, much harder to do, and will mean your customers stay with you longer.
Reason 3: Your customers will be more likely to use our tools. The more merchants using our tools the more revenue you'll make, so it's in your best interest to make the adoption rate within your own customer-base as high as possible. With our Single Sign On (SSO) capability, our widgets won't require your users to log in while navigating within your application.
Reason 4: You want your customers to thrive. If your company benefits from sales made by your customers in any way then you'll want them using our tools since we help small businesses get found by new customers, and give those new customers the confidence needed to shop with your customers.
Reason 5: You'll get the money faster. Rather than waiting for your customers to pay us and then us remitting the money back to you each month, you'll collect the money from your customers and just pay us for the base licenses used.
"But is it worth spending the dev hours to embed your widgets and support single sign on?"
Based on our experience, the answer is "yes", "Yes", and "YES!". That said, we get that engineering hours are tight and that you already have them committed to projects for the next 500 months, but luckily you can create added value for your customers by doing lighter "integrations" that just entail finding ways for our two software products to live side by side each other. Examples include letting your customers know that they can add their Merchynt (or white-labelled) review solicitation links to your existing consumer notification functionality, or add our call to actions to your customer receipt templates or purchase confirmation emails. Not all value requires actual development effort to unlock.
So there you have it. What do you think - embed or refer? Let us know your thoughts at hello@merchynt.com.
- The Merchynt Team