FastSpring changelog fastspring.com

New

New Welcome Dashboard and Onboarding Experience for Free Trials

In an effort to improve the onboarding experience of new sellers and to deliver more valuable information to our existing sellers, we’ve launched a new version of our welcome dashboard. With this launch, we’ve created two new widgets to better help sellers understand the value FastSpring delivers from day one.

First, we have enabled Checkout Preview which, with branding and localization customization, you’ll be able to see what your checkout can look like with FastSpring right from our dashboard.

Second, we’ve enabled our Total Cost of Ownership Calculator. With this calculator, you’ll be able to better understand how FastSpring saves you money in comparison to other DIY providers like Stripe. We encourage you to take a look and reach out to our sales team to better understand exactly how we can help your business save money.

Beyond these two widgets, we’ve also added blocks to provide additional valuable information such as: new product updates, customer stories, thought leadership, developer documentation and much more.

New and Improved Webhook Status Reporting

As we go into 2023, we are striving to deliver improvements to make our platform more developer friendly. To this end, we’ve released a new Webhook Log which displays rich information for each of your webhook events. Now, understand which webhook events belong to, what ID it’s associated with, how many attempts were made, and much more right from the FastSpring platform.

Not only will you get an overview, but you’ll also be able to view detailed information about the event, including its JSON payload and response history. Further, you can filter out certain webhooks based on criteria like event type, status, creation date, and more to better streamline your review of each webhook you’re using.

Want to know more? Check out our documentation here.

Collect Payments through True ACH Transfers

A vital part of any B2B transaction, FastSpring now fully supports ACH transactions for all of its sellers. Purchasers in the US or Canada can leverage ACH not only for one-time transactions, but also for rebills such as subscriptions.

Take a look at our docs to learn more about this exceptional payment method.

Improvement

• Improved on custom attributes for products to more accurately reflect changes from one product to another when a plan change happens.
• Added a new field in return.created webhook events to distinguish between a full and partial refund at the item level to improve ease of comparing total price vs. total price returned.

Fix

• Fixed an issue in which quote prices were incorrectly displayed after clicking the “Accept and Continue” button in some cases.
• Fixed an issue in which a subscription cancellation would occasionally trigger two subscription update emails.
• Fixed an issue in which some Australian orders were missing the street name in the buyer address.
• Fixed an issue in which some buyers weren’t receiving an order invoice for monthly subscriptions.
• Fixed an issue in which Digital Invoicing was not accepting valid VAT IDs from some orders in the Czech Republic.
• Fixed an issue in which some trial dates were missing in the shopping cart when a coupon was applied to a subscription.

New

Reporting and Analytics:

We have officially launched our new Reporting and Analytics Dashboards and new Data API! Now, FastSpring offers two new dedicated Dashboards: Revenue Overview and Subscription Overview in addition to a new Data API. With our new Dashboards you now have the ability to quickly analyze sales by product, country, or coupon, uncover drivers of MRR trends, track churn more closely, and understand customer lifetime value behavior at a glance. With the new Data API you can programmatically pull data into your internal data warehouse and leverage your reporting tool of choice.

For more information, check out our product page and documentation for both the Dashboards and API.

Embedded Checkout:

Embedded Checkout is live for all FastSpring sellers! Now, sellers have the ability to add an inline checkout experience to product or pricing pages or your subscription sign-up page. We’ve also added deeper branding support with CSS overrides. CSS overrides can be enabled upon request from support@fastspring.com.

Documentation around our Embedded Checkout capabilities is available here. We’ve also updated our checkout overview on our website and highly recommend you go take a look here!

Trial Without Payment:

Free trials are a key customer acquisition strategy and FastSpring continues to iterate on our ability to support free trials, including trials without the need for an upfront payment method. To better support buyer and seller workflows, we now have the ability to Reactivate inactive subscriptions directly within the platform. Now, there’s no need for a buyer to create a new ticket to continue their subscription. Instead, they can do it directly from the Account Management Portal at any time.

You can find specifics of how to set up a free trial without payment required here. If you have questions around our subscription capabilities, we’ve got all you need to know here.

Canada Tax Regulation

Whenever it comes to the ever-changing world of global taxes, we have you covered. We’ve recently made a few changes to ensure compliance with updated tax regulations in Canada. Specifically, FastSpring has updated its systems to accurately reflect GST/HST for all applicable products and subscriptions in Canada. As a part of that, we have updated our systems to collect zip/postal codes from all orders in Canada. It is now required for all Canadian purchasers to provide a zip code in the checkout.

Fix

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an api bug to create a new account accurately when using an old/already updated email address.
• Fixed an issue in which VAT was being deducted twice from the total amount in checkout when using the India Rupee.
• Fixed an issue in which activated subscription emails were displaying the incorrect date.
• Fixed an issue to send customer emails to the updated email instead of the email provided at checkout when a customer updates their email.
• Fixed an issue in which quotes were not changing status after their expiration date.
• Corrected calculations for volume discounts in NET stores in non-USD currency.
• Fixed a display issue in free trial with manual renewal in which taxes weren’t being shown on the invoice and order detail page.
• Updated the account management portal to accurately show prices for free and paid trials.
• Updated checkout to show total price including taxes and product price accurately in certain edge cases.
• Due to a recent change with our payment processors’ banking partner, we can no longer support AUD wire. We will, however, support wires from - Australia as long as they are not in AUD.
• Added support to redirect to a different dashboard for the platform landing page.

Improvement

Checkout Flows:

As we continue to optimize our checkout experiences, we have cleaned up duplicate code to ensure that we can deliver an exceptional checkout experience for current and future checkout features. We have also added the ability for buyers to enter a custom amount for purchase of an item or to use the + and - buttons to increase or decrease quantity. This ensures that buyers with larger orders can easily convert with their desired amount of items purchased.

Trial With and Without Payment:

In the months since we released Trial Without Payment, we continue to optimize and add new features to ensure that sellers have the best experience when creating free trials on the FastSpring platform. To support this, we have made the following changes:

Free Trials:

• Added support for sellers to run free trial transactions in test mode.
• Updated the CTA button to say “Start Free Trial”
• Added the ability for buyers to pay now or pay later in the account management portal during the trial period.
• Updated notification to include both buyer and seller when a free trial is started.
• Fixed an issue in which sellers were able to add a free trial under subscriptions that required a one-time setup fee.
• Updated our web storefront to ensure that when using a free trial in web storefront, buyers aren’t asked to save payment information.
• Updated free trials to ensure that buyers can easily update their payment information in the account management portal when moving to a paid trial.

Paid Trials:

• Optimized configurations to clarify the price of a paid trial when that trial is greater than zero.
• Changed display language for when a coupon would decrease the price of a paid trial to less than zero to say “Free”.

Fix

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where certain checkout sessions produced a “Validation Failed” error when quote was selected as the payment method.
• Fixed an issue with SEPA payment method where fulfillment was sometimes triggered before the order was complete.
• Fixed an issue with SBL where an invalid zip code returned an error for certain checkout sessions.
• Replaced “$0.00” with “Free” in the checkout for certain countries.
• Fixed an issue in which buyers were receiving duplicate order and subscription emails.
• Clarified subscription language in the Account Management portal.
• Fixed an error in which the “Real-time” and NACHA checkboxes weren’t being displayed in some cases.
• Updated buyer sessions quote payment method for Net Mode.
• Resolved an issue to ensure accurate completion of iDeal orders.
• Optimized subscription tools to ensure accurate billing and subscription end dates.
• Resolved an issue with rebilling to ensure that auto-renew occurs as intended.
• Resolved a display issue with the subscription.charge.completed webhook when a rebill wax completed.
• Fixed invoices and quotes to ensure that all fields display as intended.
• Fixed an issue in which volume discounts were not carried over when quantities were changed via API.
• New alert information was added for specific payments to clarify the non-real-time nature of the transaction.

Improvement

Free Trial Without Payment Method: We’ve continued to iterate on our Trial Without Payment Method features. In addition to updated support for payments in our web storefront, we now allow buyers to automatically convert from a manual subscription (needs payment entry on a monthly basis) to an automatic subscription renewal. This can be done by buyers saving their payment details within the account management portal or at purchase when entering their payment details in the web storefront by checking the “save payment details” box.

We have further enhanced Trial Without Payment so buyers can see their billing terms within the web storefront. This clarifies to buyers when their next billing date is and exactly how much they will be charged.

Embedded Checkout Embedded checkout beta is now live for select sellers! This gives them the ability to add an inline checkout to a seller-hosted webpage with support for both dark and light mode along with the full FastSpring checkout functionality including: Payment Methods, Localization, Risk & Fraud Protection, Global Tax Collection & Remittance, and PCI/PSD2 Compliance.

Fix

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug in Popup checkout where cart quantity modifications were unlocked for products that were quantity locked.

• Cleaned up our pricing code to support more VAT use cases when stores are in NET mode and utilize our volume discounts.

• Clarified our Postal Code collection field for Canadian buyers. Previously we asked for "zip code" and now we ask for "postal code".

• Fixed a bug where the quantity field for custom order items was too small.

• Fixed a bug in which the state/region field was blank when copying an order to a new custom order.

• Fixed a bug where Digital Invoicing Quotes were displaying incorrect values after the trial period.

• Fixed a bug for very rare cases in which coupons were deducted from quotes twice.

• Fixed a bug where Tax Exemption ID wouldn't show on invoices for some orders.

• Fixed a bug for certain transactions where orders were attributed incorrectly to the wrong seller.

• Fixed a pricing bug affecting certain German transactions processed in USD.

• Fixed a bug where some renewal dates in the AM portal were displayed incorrectly.

• Fixed a bug causing certain Store Builder Library (SBL) payloads to throw an address validation error.

• Fixed a bug with NPE when triggering webhooks for API quotes.

• Fixed a bug within webhooks regarding tax calculation.

• Fixed a bug in which a 500 internal server error was returned when a POST call with a nonexistent subscription ID was called.

• Fixed a bug where the “Pay Now” button was incorrectly displaying VAT/Tax calculations in the account management portal with certain subscriptions.

• Fixed a bug in the Popup checkout where the Continue and Download button settings were not being applied.

• Fixed a bug in which the “Gift Purchase” checkbox was displayed incorrectly in certain subscription trial conversions.

• Fixed a bug for very rare cases in which Account Management was incorrectly handling taxes.

New

Free Trial Without Payment Method: Available now, Trial Without Payment Method extends all the FastSpring subscription management functionality to free trials without requiring collection of a payment method. To further support free trials, we also offer a paid trial feature that allows businesses to offer a paid trial that can automatically convert into a full subscription at the end of the trial period.

Documentation is available at: fastspring.com/docs/trial-periods/

Popup Cart Quantity Field: We have updated the quantity field in the Popup Checkout Cart to allow numbers to be entered as well as the ability to use the + and - buttons to increase and decrease quantity respectively, thereby improving the customer experience for buyers purchasing a large quantity of items. A maximum value of 9999 can be entered into the quantity field.

GA4: Google Analytics 4 is replacing Universal Analytics. On July 1, 2023, standard universal Analytics properties will no longer process data. As such, we now support GA4 codes within our Google Analytics integration. Customers should only enter their GA4 property IDs when they are ready. For more information, here is a migration guide from Google: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417?hl=en&ref_topic=10737980

Improvement

Payment Approvals: To continue to improve approval rates, we have migrated existing subscriptions based in the UK to our new merchant account in the UK.

Webhooks: We now provide additional card data in the webhook and API for declined transactions.

Here is an example:

If the payment method is CC and the decline reason is “do not honor”, then the webhook and API will send the following additional information:

“Expiry”: “12/25”

“cardEnding”: “1234”

“cardType”: “VISA”

Platform Pricing Logic: General improvements to platform pricing logic and stability.

Fix

• Bug Fixes:

Fixed a bug causing some buyers to receive duplicate order and subscription emails in certain cases.

• Fixed an issue where select subscriptions were pushed into dunning prematurely in certain cases.

• Fixed an issue with PayPal where certain buyers were redirected to the Account Management Portal instead of the order completion page.

• Fixed an issue with setting the default payment method in the Account Management Portal.

• Fixed an error when localizing price through Store Builder Library (SBL), where an invalid zip resulted in errors.

• Fixed an issue with webhooks firing in certain tax refund situations when they shouldn’t.

• Improved retry logic for bank transfers.

• Fixed a pricing bug in our DI quoting tool that misapplied net pricing (tax exclusive) as gross pricing (tax inclusive).

• Fixed an error that occurred in certain cases when a buyer attempted to create a quote directly from the Popup Checkout.

• Fixed an issue where some iDeal orders were not completing automatically.

• Updated translations for test emails.

New

Changes based on your feedback:

• Short paid orders: Historically when buyers delivered a payment that was less than the full amount due, the order would not be automatically completed, which caused several issues like delayed or stalled fulfillment. This was often related to wires where an intermediary bank was involved and charged an unforeseen fee. The default minimum is $20 or 2%, whichever is lower, but sellers can also define how much they are willing to accept below the full order value in order to streamline their operations and keep fulfillment on time and automated. We will allow this at the company level - this can be updated in the Account Summary > Product Ordering Terms section. The Order Details page will now show a Settlement Amount and a Settlement Discrepancy amount when there is a discrepancy.

Fix

Bug fixes:

• Outbound bcc: We’ve removed the "Outbound bcc address" option.

New

Features:

• Revenue Overview analytics dashboard beta release: This is an initial release that is not yet broadly available. If you have interest in getting early access, please reach out to aholmes@fastspring.com.

Changes based on your feedback:

• Subscription reports: Sellers can now create subscription history reports.

Fix

Bug fixes:

• German language: Improper capitalization of "Alle" in German popup. This has been fixed.
• Duplicate emails: Certain buyers cited receiving duplicate order and subscription emails. This has been fixed.
• iDeal transactions: Fixed a bug causing iDeal orders from completing automatically. One-time setup fee: One-time setup fee was shown on some manual renewal orders. This has been fixed.
• Coupon: When a coupon discount duration is 3, sometimes the periods were not honored and extra discounted charges were made. This has been fixed.
• PayPal button in Popup Checkout: The “Pay” button was grayed out when PayPal was selected by buyers in Canada.
• Resuming a paused subscription: We fixed a but causing an error message that said, "Next subscription charge is not due yet" when trying to resume a paused subscription.

New

Features:

• SEPA: Give European buyers what they want! SEPA is one of the most popular payment methods across Europe, and it is now available in 9 countries through your FastSpring checkout: Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia and Portugal. Learn more here.
• Risk improvements: Added new data points that we feed into our machine learning risk model, so that we reduce the number of false positives.

Changes based on your feedback:

• Withholding Tax API: The GET /Orders API did not contain withholding information. We added withholding information to the GET /orders API responses. We are supporting the multiple iterations of the API - product path, date range, product path & date range; end date; and with returns only. If there was no tax withholding, we are still adding a boolean that says taxWithholding = FALSE; but not including any other data such as currency, amount, or percentage.
• Withholding Tax for refunds: Sellers can now understand if a refund has Withholding Tax associated with it via webhook. We added a Withholding area to the return.created webhook. It includes a boolean about whether the return has withholding or not; if the boolean is True, we will include currency, amount, and percentage rate. If it's False, we'll just include the boolean indicating that TaxWithholding is FALSE.

Fix

Bug fixes:

• Account Management Portal subscription management: Increasing quantity of a subscription threw unexpected errors in certain cases when clicking the “Pay Now” button. This has now been fixed. VAT checkout: We fixed a bug where the total amount was incorrect for certain tax exempt orders when a product level discount was applied.
• VAT on shipping charges: Taxes were missing from shipping charges on certain orders in the Classic Store. VAT exemption: VAT was still being charged despite VAT exemption on certain orders when store was in gross pricing mode. This has been fixed. Popup Checkout country selector: The Popup Checkout country selector was ignoring certain settings. This has been fixed.
• Subscription add-ons: We fixed a bug that caused an error when applying a discount to a subscription's add-on product.
• Account Management Portal: Fixed a bug where the "View Details" link did not take the buyer to appropriate subscription when the subscription was on page 2, 3, etc. Coupon: Fixed a bug that occurred when applying a coupon with discount duration = 0 to a subscription shows undiscounted price.
• German language: "Test2" appeared on language box when Deutsch was set as the preferred language. This has been fixed.

New

Features:

• Fallback logic: Improved our fallback logic to improve approval rates.

Changes to keep you compliant:

• Mexico invoice disclosure: We are now supporting a requirement to show the VAT ID on all invoices whenever the buyer's address is in Mexico. We now display our Mexican VAT ID just under our Vendor information on applicable invoices.

Fix

Bug fixes:

• Store Builder Library (SBL) with Web Storefronts: SBL whitelisting now excludes Web Storefronts to avoid errors.

New

Features:

• UK approval rates: We have added a UK merchant account with several processors to improve UK approval rates.

Fix

Bug fixes:

• Paypal: PayPal was not appearing as a payment method option for buyers in countries outside Europe. This has been fixed.
• Digital Invoicing quote translation: The word “QUOTE” at the top of a quote was translated to “ANGEBOTS” in German. “Angebots” is plural, “Angebot” is the correct translation. This has been fixed.
• Email notifications: There were instances where multiple email notifications were being sent to buyers when only one was needed. This has been fixed.