Refersion

What do you like best?

ease of implementation and setup, the support team was always amazing.

What do you dislike?

If you are using Chargebee with Refersion and offer subscriptions that are unit/user-based and you have midterm changes (i.e. customer adding additional users/units in the middle of their 1-year, quarter, or monthly subscription) - you are ABSOLUTELY going to be overpaying your affiliates by thousands and will GROSSLY be overbilled by Refersion.

Here is a quick illustration;

- Your affiliate is in a 10% offer program

- A referred customer of the affiliate has an annual subscription of $5,000 per year for XX number of units/users

- The referred customer increases their subscription in the middle of their term... let's say purchasing an additional unit/user for $100.

- Chargebee elegantly calculates the prorated amount due to the customer based on the remaining credit available on the term and will bill the customer via the billing method on file and apply a credit for the remainder of the invoice. So the actual amount directly billed on the CC would be less than $100 (due to prorated amount of the increase during the mid-term). Let's say $90 for simplicity's sake.

- Refersion, however, will calculate the commission paid to the affiliate as $5,100 x 10% ($510) rather than $90 x 10% or $9...or what was billed to the customer's credit card.

- Now couple this with this growing customer that increases their units multiple times during the term... so Refersion would calculate EACH time at $5,000+ x 10% as the affiliate commission each time.

- Now... add this element to the issue. Not only would they be overpaying your affiliates, but they also overcharge the merchant. If you do an extremely large number of conversions per month... I can't recall the number, you will elevate to their next vendor tier moving from $89 per month to paying an additional percentage (I think 1%-2%) on the revenue processed. Yes.. you will pay an additional 1%-2% on an INCORRECT amount of revenue processed.

When I brought this up to Refersion and they worked closely with Chargebee, they acknowledged that although the Chargebee webhook was providing the payload for the correct commission calculation (i.e. $90 paid via CC) this was indeed the way that the commission was being calculated (against the invoice amount rather than paid amount) and stated that "the issue didn't affect anyone but me and is an edge case that may be addressed in the future."

We offered to pay to have flexibility on determining what the commission was paid against, however, they wouldn't proceed.

Let me clearly state that Refersion is a really great tool depending on your customer subscription type... their support team has been ABSOLUTELY amazing and responsive, and perhaps we truly are an "edge case". I also do not think that they have been nefarious in any way.

I do believe based on the time that we have used the platform and seeing the very minimal number of product releases, enhancements, and UI evolution that they are likely short-staffed from a development perspective and/or perhaps haven't embraced an agile development methodology that would allow for this critical issue to be addressed.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Initially, a great product that we rapidly deployed, however when we tightly integrated Chargebee with our platform and allowed customers to increased/add subscriptions on demand we determined expensive/critical calculation issues.