Every Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company needs payments. Whether by bank transfer or card payments, all SaaS companies charge their customers on a recurring basis for the software they provide. As a result, most payments advice for SaaS companies focuses on optimizing pricing and recurring billing operations to improve customer acquisition and retention ratios. While this is important work, it’s just the beginning of how SaaS companies should think about monetizing payments.

Consumer-like expectations are entering the B2B software industry, forcing SaaS businesses to develop new strategies to compete for customers. One winning approach for vertically-focused SaaS companies, in particular, is embedding payments to acquire customers, increase revenue, and reduce churn.

At a glance it’s hard to imagine how pizza has anything to do with payments, but here at Finix we sometimes like to use analogies to describe complex concepts, and we’re especially fond of food analogies (payments layer cake, anyone?). Basically, there are four ways to get pizza, and when you break it down, there are also four ways to integrate payments into your SaaS or ecommerce platform.