How Advantage Powers a Seamless Digital Experience
Scenario: It’s early morning on Black Friday, and a visitor lands on your site after noticing your limited-time holiday promotion. They open a featured story and scroll through the first few paragraphs before reaching a familiar paywall prompt: “Subscribe now to continue reading!” Clicking through takes them to your Cider Plus site’s landing page, where your Black Friday special is front and center.
From this moment onward, the Advantage ecosystem (Advantage, Advantage Paywall, Advantage Single Sign-On, and Cider Plus) will facilitate a frictionless customer journey. Let’s take a closer look at how the ecosystem’s components work together! But first, a quick overview of the products involved:
- Advantage: Our comprehensive subscription, membership, and order-management platform that serves as the operational backbone for publishers around the world.
- Cider Plus: Fully integrated with Advantage, Cider Plus is a modern, high-performance eCommerce platform that showcases your products beautifully and connects seamlessly with Advantage to power premium digital experiences.
- Advantage Paywall: Our newest product - a flexible, rules-driven access-control system that delivers real-time content entitlement decisions across digital channels.
- Advantage Single Sign-On (SSO): A customer identity and access management layer that provides secure single sign-on and entitlement checks across all customer-facing digital properties.
Note: for clarity and flow, Advantage Paywall and Advantage Single Sign-On appear as “Paywall”, “Advantage SSO” or “SSO” where appropriate.
Let’s rewind back to the customer’s initial attempt to read an article on our content site. Any time a user tries to view protected content, Advantage Paywall steps in and performs a quick check. It needs to know two things: first, who the user is, and second, whether they have the entitlements (often created via Cider Plus) required to view that particular piece of content. Paywall figures out both of these components by communicating with Advantage SSO.
If Paywall determines that the user doesn’t currently have access, it provides them with the option to 1) sign in and access content, or 2) register a new account and buy the appropriate product through your Cider Plus site. If the user elects to buy the product and check out, they receive a receipt, confirmation message, and resume their content experience shortly afterwards, maintaining continuity throughout the entire transaction. Immediately after checkout, Cider Plus sends the order to Advantage, which generates and sends the customer’s new entitlement to Advantage SSO.
Back at the content site, Paywall challenges the user again, verifying their entitlement status with SSO. This time, their entitlement is valid, and they’re allowed to view the paywalled site page.
After the user makes their initial purchase, all four products in the Advantage ecosystem continue to work together to enhance the customer experience and maximize revenue. Advantage does exactly what it’s designed to do, maintaining customer information, entitlements, renewal dates, recurring billing processes and schedules, special offers, and much more. Marketing agents can create and test promotions for their Cider Plus site, test and refine Paywall setups, optimize performance with built-in analytics, and leverage Advantage’s ever-increasing suite of AI tools to streamline daily tasks.
Most of this is invisible to the customer (as it should be!), but they still benefit from the Advantage ecosystem’s seamless integration. Advantage Paywall guarantees that subscribers receive correct and uninterrupted content access as soon as their payment is processed. SSO provides the authentication and entitlement checks necessary to keep subscribers signed in where they need to be, encouraging early engagement with paid features. And Cider Plus gives subscribers everything they need to modify or upgrade their subscription with a wide variety of easy-to-use customer self-service actions.
Together, the four integrated products in the Advantage ecosystem make the post-checkout experience frictionless for customers and sellers alike. This single, vertically integrated product ecosystem supports the subscriber’s needs, strengthens retention, encourages upgrades, and ultimately maximizes long-term revenue for the Advantage client – all without the hassle of complex third-party integrations. Check out the pages listed below for more information, or contact your AdvantageCS representative today!
Click these links to learn more about Advantage, Advantage Paywall, Advantage Single Sign-On, or Cider Plus.