Monetizing embedded payments is a powerful way for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to open up new streams of recurring revenue. But, it’s also a big leap into a space many software companies might not know much about.
Of the payment platforms that offer strong embedded payments capabilities, most lack a way for your development team to fully evaluate the integration before committing. That means taking a leap of faith: signing on first, then hoping the system works seamlessly with your software and delivers the value you expect. It’s a risky way to build a core part of your business.
Sandbox testing solves this problem by offering a risk-free way for your business and development teams to experience a payments platform in action before you decide. It allows you to test things like features, functionality, user experience and even cost and revenue estimates. More importantly, you can build rapid prototypes and thoroughly test customizations, all before you commit to anything or spend a dime.
Not all payment platforms offer immersive, self-serve sandbox testing. But when you find the right one, you’ll gain three major advantages:
- Less guesswork from a monetization standpoint, allowing you to start from a more knowledgeable position and scale quickly
- Faster and easier go-to-market
- Reduced costs and maximized return on the time, money and effort you put into payments
In this article, we’ll break down these three benefits and explore why testing in a sandbox before you commit is the best move for successful payments monetization.
1: Sandbox Testing Removes the Guesswork
Payments is a complex industry. If your company doesn’t already have deep domain expertise, moving into the space can raise a lot of important questions around development, payment flows and the overall user experience (UI). Sandbox testing a payments platform ahead of time lets you explore the tech before you commit or sign any contracts. That removes risk from the process and adds clarity to your payment operations.
Just some of the questions to ask when looking for a great integrated payments platform include:
- Is this a good fit for our software, wider tech stack and goals?
- What features are available and what options do we have when building with this platform?
- How might the available features come together in a solution tailored to our unique needs?
- What integration options do we have and how do they fit with our team’s internal skill set?
- Where can we leverage off-the-shelf code and components to save time and money?
- What can we expect our costs to look like based on the features we use?
- What will our revenue look like depending on our product mix? What’s the financial upside to payments monetization?
- How will these systems impact our time-to-market?
- How can this solution support a now, next, later roadmap?
Rather than hoping the answers to these questions ultimately work out in your favor, sandbox testing lets you map the path to success in advance.
2: Get to Market Faster and Easier
Exploring, designing and testing systems ahead of time might seem like an unnecessary extra step, but it can actually help you save time and get your payments up and running much faster than traditional routes. Why?
- Self-Serve Efficiency: The ability to sign up and dive straight into evaluating a platform cuts a ton of time from a potentially long sales and onboarding process. That’s convenient, but it also means you can start designing and testing immediately, potentially within hours — a huge advantage in getting to market quickly. If the platform is right for you, you can hit the ground running. If it isn’t, you’ll find out early and won’t get stuck doing time-consuming rework later in the process
- Developer-Friendly Workflows: A robust sandbox provides your development team with turnkey access to a unified prototyping and testing environment. That enables them to quickly understand the core features, code, integration options and how it’ll all come together with your software. It’s a much more effective, hands-on method than just poring over documentation, and the result is better testing, faster development and, ultimately, shortened time-to-market
- Shortcuts, Cheat Codes and Options: Platforms offering no-code and low-code elements enable your developers to minimize the work required to build an ideal solution. A good sandbox allows them to see and try the full library of no-code, low-code and application program interfaces (API) driven options, ensuring you waste no time custom coding something you can easily just tweak or use off the shelf as-is
- Contextual Help: A good sandbox provides your developers with contextual help systems and tool recommendations. Rather than taking a blind first step, your team can use tools to shepherd them through features and workflows, helping them arrive at the prototyping stage faster
3: Reduce Costs and Improve ROI
A payments platform sandbox can reduce both development and processing costs — directly improving the ROI of your payments operations and making monetization more worthwhile.
Platform sandbox testing accomplishes this in five key ways:
- Accelerates development, reducing the time and resources required to launch
- Minimizes the risk of choosing the wrong solution, saving time, money and effort
- Lowers your compliance burden and risk exposure by allowing you to test and evaluate features that shift risk to your technology partner
- Improves forecasting accuracy, so you can better balance expected revenues and fees
- Speeds up time to market, allowing you to start generating payment revenue sooner
Try First, Pay Later With NMI
We’re excited to announce a new self-serve payments experience that allows you to sign up and start exploring the NMI Payments ecosystem at no cost. You can try out our features and integrations (and even prototype your solutions), with zero commitment or risk.
For your development team, this self-service sandbox offers access to our suite of APIs and no-code and low-code components. Your team won’t just get a feel for what NMI has to offer, they’ll actually be able to start building right away.
On the business side, this lets you estimate costs and model potential revenue based on your selected features, pricing structures and user base before committing. This can help you validate the economics of payments monetization and determine whether NMI Payments aligns with your growth and revenue goals.
To find out more, reach out to a member of our team or, better yet, click here and take our new self-serve portal for a test drive now.