Automating fulfillment: seamless online payment & access

Microform Academic Publishers use LibLynx Connect to manage individual and institutional access to their extensive archives. Individual users can buy subscription access on their site, but fullfilment of those subscriptions wasn’t an automated process – a customer service person had to verify the payment and set up each new account.
Our API and supporting tools are capable of automating fulfillment of subscriptions, and we recently worked with Microform to make this a much slicker and faster process.

Step 1 – handling payment provider callback

Microform use WorldPay to perform payment card processing. Like most payment providers, WorldPay support a ‘callback’ where successful payments can trigger a URL request to the site.
We adapted this callback to automatically create a suitable account. Here’s a diagram showing how this happened:

The callback collected all the required data, such as account name, subscription start and end dates, and the rights allocated to the subscription. This data is formatted as JSON and simply POSTed to our account creation API.
Our API creates a new account, and sends the new subscriber an invitation email so that they can complete the setup of their account by choosing a password.

Step 2 – customizing the invitation email

The LibLynx Publisher Portal includes powerful email customization features that can be used to create great looking emails. We have a number of battle-tested HTML email templates – all a publisher needs to do is fill in the blanks. Here’s an example showing how Microform customized their new subscriber emails:

When this is rendered as an HTML email, the result looks something like this:

In Summary

We completely automated Microform’s purchase process using our powerful API and administration portal. This delivered a seamless payment and access experience for Microform’s customers, and reduced their sales costs for individual subscriptions.
If you’d like to know how we could help automate your sales processes, please get in touch