Getting Started with Arc XP Subscriptions

A lightning-fast site is a boon for your readers, and easy-to-use editorial tools help your content creators to be more productive. But that’s not enough. In order to thrive, publishers need a sustainable business model. For many publishers today, that means direct reader revenue.

Arc Subscriptions is a suite of tools that help publishers connect with their audience and sell products online, including digital subscriptions. Our focus is on giving publishers the tools necessary to build a testing culture and the first-class integrations you’d expect from an in-suite solution.

Security is baked into the core of Arc Subscriptions, using patterns and practices learned from our time growing The Washington Post’s digital subscriber audience to more than a million subscribers. Akamai’s endpoint protection and Google’s reCaptcha also help to keep bad actors at bay.

Arc Subscriptions is organized into three verticals: Identity, Retail, and Sales.

Identity provides user registration and login functionality. It’s also the home to the customer service portal where your agents can assist customers with refunds, password resets, and other common tasks.

Marketers love the Retail application because it makes it simple to manage a product catalog and create new offer pages without pestering the dev team. The self-service paywall admin also lives within retail and makes it easy to try out targeting content access strategies.

Once a potential subscriber finds a compelling offer, they’re shepherded through the checkout process using Sales. Arc Subscriptions is integrated with a host of payment gateways and manages the re-billing of customers based on the cadence established in Retail. Sales also includes reporting functionality to keep your stakeholders and dependent systems informed.

Identity

Building meaningful relationships starts with knowing your audience. This set of APIs powers user registration and logins on your site.

Registration and Login APIs

• Social sign-in: Visitors can create logins for your site directly or quickly sign up via social providers. Arc Subscriptions is currently integrated with Facebook, Google, and Apple.
• reCaptcha: You can opt to protect login and account creation with reCaptcha v2 to make it more difficult for bots to sign up.
• Email Verification: You can require your users to verify their email, ensuring that the email is valid.
• Session cap and duration: In an effort to limit credential sharing, publishers can configure the number of active sessions for a given account. Older sessions will be invalidated on a first-in, first-out basis. Set the length of time your users can remain logged in via a persistent session without having to resubmit their login credentials.
• User profile and attributes: Identity’s core profile schema can be extended using attributes, which allow you to capture additional information about the user during registration (or via account profile updates).

Blacklisted Domains

• Maintain a list of IP addresses and domains to reduce potential bot and malicious accounts.

Password Requirements

• One Time Access Link: Giving customers options is the key to providing a frictionless experience. Sometimes, customers can’t recall their password (or don’t have access to their password keeper) but want to log in without going through the password reset process. You can email the customer a clickable link that grants them a non-refreshable session.

Customer Service Admin

The customer support portal allows your agents to easily find and assist your customers with all Identity and subscription-related issues that occur. Agents can search by Identity account or order number. To learn more, check out the Getting Started Guide For Customer Service Agents.

• Reader Assistance: From here your customer support agents can view reader account details, subscriptions, and transactions.
• Subscription and transaction management: When a reader has an issue with their subscription or payment, agents are able to quickly resolve it by issuing a payment refund or adding a free subscription. Agents can also help readers to change or cancel a subscription.

Retail

Paywall

Building a successful metered content strategy shouldn’t require a PhD! The Arc Subscriptions Paywall module provides an easy-to-use admin to control access to your valuable content and iterate on your metering approach. The Paywall supports the entire range of content access approaches — from a hard paywall that requires registration or even a subscription to access any content to a leaky metered paywall that only asks your most loyal readers to pay.

The most granular part of the paywall is the rule.

An individual rule targets specific conditions and outlines how much content a reader can consume before they need to sign in or purchase a specific product.

A rule can target the following content attributes:

• Content type- Story, video, gallery, or graphic.
• Content restrictions- Each piece of content (article, gallery, video, etc.) can have a specific paywall status, which is labeled Content Restrictions in ANS.
• Content section — Target a paywall rule to section(s) of your website. This enables publishers to target their sports news, for example, and present sports-focused offers to engaged users. The available values are powered by the site service.

A rule can target the following audience attribute:

• Device class — You can target rules to apply to mobile, tablet, and desktop visitors.

Once you have focused on the content and audience, you can specify whether the user needs to simply register and login or if they need to have a specific subscription. You can specify multiple subscription products that are sufficient to overcome the rule.

For example, you could offer both a Basic and Premium subscription. Most articles only require a Basic subscription whereas articles with a content restriction status of ‘premium’ require an active Premium subscription.

If the user does not meet the registration/subscription requirements, you can specify how many pieces of content the user can consume before they’re presented with a specific offer. If you want a hard paywall, simply set the allowance to zero.

In addition to subscriptions attached to individual users, you can also configure IP whitelists that exempt users from the paywall. For example, a client can set up a Digital All Access product within Retail and then grant that product to all employees visiting from the client’s office.

The paywall can run on AMP pages.

Offers

This module gives your marketing team the power to quickly build engaging offer pages. The pages are rendered via PageBuilder, allowing your site developers to share components from the content portion of your sites and enjoy a consistent, modern development experience.

The Offers admin provides self-service management of products, prices, and offers. Marketers can easily create new products to sell online and build offers to showcase the products.

Product and Price Catalog

Products

Everything within Arc Subscriptions is orientated around selling digital products. This is the self-service admin for marketers to configure which products are available for sale. Through the Arc retail functionality, you are able to easily create, configure, and view all of the products in your digital catalog.

Pricing Strategies

Each product needs at least one pricing strategy, which is a sequence of rates the customer will be billed. You can configure one-time or recurring payments and define the recurrence intervals for daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.

Example pricing strategies:

• One-time: One payment of $19.99.
• Flat recurring: $9.99 every six weeks forever.
• Graduated: $1.99 every month for 4 months, then $9.99 every four weeks forever.

Many publishers will set up digital subscription products with a monthly and annual rate as well as a host of discounted rates, such as $1.99 for the first four weeks.

Sales

Arc Subscriptions supports a wide selection of payment gateway partners. Using hosted pay pages allows Arc Subscriptions to offer bank-level security with a consistent user experience. This module includes the core of subscription management, including re-billing tokens and providing APIs to power subscription management. Arc Subscriptions also offers reporting functionality via an API so that you can quickly understand how your business is performing and easily sync business-critical data with other systems.

Arc Subscriptions supports three different subscription acquisition methods, which enables a host of business strategies. In this context, the acquisition method refers to how the customer came to possess the subscription. One underlying subscription product SKU, such as Digital All Access, can be granted to a user in one of these three ways:

• Paid: When a customer purchases a subscription using an Arc Subscriptions-orchestrated checkout, this subscription is attributed to the Identity account as a paid subscription.

• Linked: A client-controlled service that is outside of the Arc Subscriptions universe can Securely Communicate With Arc Subscriptions to grant a subscription to a customer without a related Arc Subscriptions transaction. This acquisition method is intended for scenarios where the user is entitled to a subscription because of a purchase made elsewhere. For example, the customer purchased a print subscription which was bundled with digital access.

• Free: A customer can be granted a free subscription by a customer service agent from within the admin. This is intended for scenarios where the customer should have access to a subscription without a related transaction. For example, the advertising department might want to grant digital access to the Chief Marketing Officer of a large advertiser so that the CMO doesn’t hit the paywall while checking out their ads in action.

Updating Active Subscriptions

At times you will want to update a readers subscription as a retention effort or as a large price strategy change. Changes to one subscriber’s product or price can be made in the Customer Support Portal on the active subscription screen. To do a mass price change to many subscribers, Arc Subscriptions offers two Developer APIs that can be used to update based on Subscription ID or the Product and Start Date. Details on using these APIs can be found in the Arc XP Sales Developer APIs article.

Group Subscriptions

Selling one subscription is great, but selling a whole bundle at once is even better. Arc Subscriptions supports basic enterprise subscription management and will be adding additional functionality in the coming months.

There are two main ways of granting access: sites and seats.

• Site access is granted via IP range entitlements. Users visiting from a specified IP range will be granted the associated subscription.
• Seat access leverages associated subscriptions or user email domains with a group access code.

More details on group subscriptions and implementation can be found in the Add group subscription member endpoint.

Payment Gateways

Arc Subscriptions offers preferred payment gateways, including Stripe and Braintree, and has also implemented an extensible payment gateway option using the IFX platform. Clients must have their own account with the payment gateway.

Payment Optimization

Clients can configure a series of payment retry attempts when a renewal attempt fails. For each attempt, successful or failed, a WebSocket event will be available to trigger the ARC client to contact the customer.

Reports

Arc Subscriptions offers a handful of Extract Reports that can be used to connect with your reporting system.

• financial: Orders and financial transactions
• user: Registered accounts and Sales users
• activity: All changes made to subscriptions and users accounts
• csrAudit: History of events and activity through the Customer Service Admin by representatives
• event: Current events in Retail
• product: Current products in Retail
• order: Current orders in Sales

Arc XP Integrations

Arc XP Permissions

The Retail APIs for managing offers and paywalls are now integrated with Arc Permissions, making it easy to control which roles have the ability to view offer and paywall data, publish an offer, and make changes to your organization’s settings.

• Site Service: Maintain a list of sections in your paywall.
• Photo Center: Store and maintain images for your products and offers using Arc’s image management application.
• Developer Center: Developers can generate Personal Access Tokens (PAT) to start working with the APIs.

Developer Guide

To assist your site developers to quickly get set up and working with Subscriptions, a host of interfaces, APIs, SDKs, and other tools are available.

There are a few main touch-points for developers:

• Developer APIs: These APIs are for machine-to-machine calls that typically take place outside of the context of a user action. When migrating users into Identity, for example, client developers will use a Developer API. Client developers can easily interact with Arc Subscriptions developer APIs using their Personal Access Token (PAT), making it easy to build external reports and keep other systems in sync with what’s on offer with Arc Subscriptions.

• SDK: Arc Subscriptions offers a JavaScript SDK for both Identity and Sales. This makes building a seamless experience quick and abstracts away much of the complexity. The SDK interacts with the Public APIs under the hood.

• Public APIs: These APIs are intended to be consumed by an end user, such as a person logging into your site. While the SDK is the recommended path for interacting with these APIs, there are some situations such as a native mobile app where working with the APIs directly is the best option.

• WebSockets: Keep up to date on key events within Arc Subscriptions by subscribing to your organization’s WebSockets stream. Events such as user registration and new subscription starts are broadcast, allowing you to build integrations and send transactional emails.