active relay review

ActiveRelay Review: How To Create Order Forms & Process Payments with ActiveCampaign

Carl Taylor | September 13, 2016

In this Review of ActiveRelay you’ll discover what it does, why you should use it, and what features are missing right now.

If you haven’t already tried ActiveRelay I recommend taking their 15 day Free Trial.

What is ActiveRelay?

Active Relay - The Best Payment Platform for ActiveCampaign

It’s a payment platform that was built for ActiveCampaign. It’s designed to allow you to create order forms in seconds without all the complicated integrations that in the past you had to use.

No longer do you need to rely on tools such as Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and a bunch of other alternatives to try and create a checkout and payment integration that works with ActiveCampaign.

If you aren’t familiar with what ActiveCampaign is you should see my detailed review of ActiveCampaign over on my personal blog.

The good news for you if you choose to use ActiveRelay is it’s now on our Supported Platform List, so you know you can get support and assistance from our team to help you implement and set it up in your business.

How ActiveRelay Works In Your Sales Funnel

ActiveRelay Review - Payment Order Form For ActiveCampaign

You start with your sales page, that has all the copy that convinces someone to buy your product or service, then on the page you have a big button that says “Add To Cart” or “Buy Now”

When that button is clicked you then send them through to an Order Page that asks for their payment details to process the order.

This is where ActiveRelay comes in. It is the Order Page for ActiveCampaign that you link to from your Sales Pages.

Any sales submitted through the Order Form gets processed by the Payment Processor (in this case Stripe) and then integrates with ActiveCampaign to set tags and capture information to be stored and deliver the product or service through Automations in ActiveCampaign.

After the Order Form it would then send the buyer through to a thank you page that you set either back on your website or the next step in your sales funnel.

With ActiveRelay you now have the same types of Ecommerce & Order Processing functionality that Ontraport and Infusionsoft have built in for your ActiveCampaign Account.

Checkout / Order Form Page Designs for Active Campaign

Right now the templates allow for basic colour changes anything further than that you’ll need knowledge of CSS  (which our Concierge team can do for you!) but they are beautiful and simple and just so easy to create.

Here’s a couple of examples…

ActiveRelay Review - Order Form for ActiveCampaign example

ActiveRelay Review: Payment Processing for Active Campaign and Stripe

How Deeply Does It Integrate Order Forms with ActiveCampaign?

Each Order / Checkout Form You Build for Active Campaign Integrates

How ActiveRelay Integrates With ActiveCampaign Order Forms

    • Add Contact To List: You select the ActiveCampaign list to add them to
    • Tag On Purchase: Apply Tag/s on product purchase and or initial charge of subscription
    • Tag On Refund: Apply Tag/s on partial or full refund of product
    • Tag On Subscription Cancel: Apply Tag/s on subscription cancellation (only relevant for subscription products)
    • Tag on Failed Subscription Payment: Apply Tag/s on failed subscription payment (only relevant for subscription products)
    • Tag on Credit Card Expiring In 30 Days: Apply Tag/s on credit card expiring in 30 days (only relevant for subscription products)

How do the Refunds and Cancellations work?

When a refund is processed or cancellation of a subscription occurs within ActiveRelay it will automatically apply the tags you set to the contact record of the purchaser so you can run an automation to take action based on this cancellation or refund, like revoke access to a membership site or assign a task for a sales person to follow up for feedback.

What about The Failed Subscription payments?

ActiveRelay takes care of what is known as “Dunning” which is a fancy word for following up people whose payments have failed.

When a subscription payment fails, ActiveRelay will send an email after each failure (up to 3x) giving them the opportunity to update their billing details or retry the payment.

Due to this the failed payment tag that you set on the Order form will only be applied after ALL attempts to rebill the client’s credit card have failed.

Reduce Churn with Credit Card Expiry Reminders

Another benefit of ActiveRelay is the in-built credit card update reminders which are sent directly to those who’s credit card are about to expire, reducing credit card expiration subscription cancellations.

What Data is captured into ActiveCampaign about the Purchase?

Within the contact record of a user’s ActiveCampaign account each product will create and apply data to the follow fields only if they are toggled on in the order form.

ActiveRelay Billing and Shipping Fields for ActiveCampaign

Billing Fields:

  • Street address
  • City
  • State
  • Postcode
  • Country

Shipping Fields: (if you ship a physical product)

  • Street address
  • City
  • State
  • Postcode
  • Country

Right now these fields will be unique to the product they purchased. This means there is potential for a lot of unique billing and or shipping fields within a user’s ActiveCampaign account if you sell a lot of different products.

Dan DeWitte, the founder of ActiveRelay, explains that the reason they have chosen this process is a client may purchase more than one product from a user and have different billing/ shipping and or contact number to the original purchase. And this limits the risk of data being overwritten.

CRM Notes:

ActiveRelay Notes in ActiveCampaign from Purchase / Refund Event

All of the transaction data will be pushed into the user’s client’s contact record via the notes areas and they are displayed as follows:

{Purchase status} [Purchase ID] {Product Name} [Charge Price] {Date and time of transaction}

The Statuses that are relayed in the notes record are

  • Purchased = denotes initial charge of subscription or purchase of product.
  • Charge = denotes second or consecutive charges to subscription product.
  • Partial refund = denotes partial refund of a charge or product purchase.
  • Refunded = denotes completed refund of charge or product purchase.
  • Canceled = denotes cancellation of subscription product.
  • Completed = denotes completion of a subscription plan

What’s great about ActiveRelay?

  • It’s simple to use and easy to get started
  • It’s built solely for Active Campaign, meaning it has deep integration
  • It handles one time products, subscriptions and payment plans
  • It provides automatic follow ups for failed subscription payments to decrease churn
  • It provides automatic follow ups based on credit cards expiring to again decrease churn
  • Dan DeWitte, the founder, is open to feedback from his clients on how to keep adding features that will make it even better and more useful.
  • It’s pricing is simple and affordable.

What could be improved?

  • Adding more Payment Processing Options such as Paypal (which the founder says is in the works)
  • Ability to have different currencies per order form
  • Deeper integrations for subscriptions like Renewal Dates to Custom Fields
  • Ability to have 1 order form with either Upfront payment or payment plan option
  • One Click Upsells and Order Bumps (which the founder says is in the works)
  • Ability to edit the Emails that are sent on failed subscription payments
  • Ability to choose to map the Billing and Shipping Fields to existing custom fields if you don’t want new fields to be created for every product

Should you sign up for ActiveRelay to add ecommerce functionality to ActiveCampaign?

Short answer YES.

Sure there are alternatives like ClickFunnels, Gravity Forms with a Stripe Addon, WooCommerce, etc… none of these were built solely with the focus on integrating to ActiveCampaign.

So if your order processing is important to you and you want deep integration to ActiveCampaign then ActiveRelay is the best tool you could choose.

At the very least I recommend taking their 15 day Free Trial to see for yourself.

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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