We're a training & coaching company selling training programs, courses and subscriptions mainly in the EU so we encountered quite some issues with VAT in the past. Abowire is the answer to making this process easy and painless.

The onboarding was very smooth, easy and straightforward (we tested the Sandbox, which came with an onboarding flow). It's easy to set up your company informationn, the product/subscription and to connect your bank, Stripe and Paypal to receive payments. Great that they offer many different options. You get up & running superquickly, which is a huge plus. The interface is also very clean and easy to navigate, which is another big plus.

When we 'sold' a product to ourselves to test it, it seemed that the flow for the buyer is also pretty quick and straight-forward. However, it does require the user to sign up for the Abowire portal. There's a way to integrate the user management on your own website, but that needs some development and is not straight-forward.

The same holds for customization of the check-out pages (e.g. fonts, button colors, etc) - you cannot easily change this without code. The only thing you can change easily is the company logo. This means that the look & feel of this check-out page isn't in line with your company brand and might feel odd for the user. After all, it's a payment page so people might feel not so secure if they end up on a page that looks different than where they found the product.

Abowire also takes care of the user authenticiation/email verification and welcome emails, an invoice and thank you page. This is actually super handy because it saves tons of time to set this flow up on your own side. However, bear in mind that none of these (as far as I could see) are easily customizable to fit your brand as of now. This is the main reason why I took off 1 taco. I would prefer to have 1 brand experience rather than split it up between my brand and Abowire's - or have an easy way to customize it to fit our brand.

The other limitation is that it currently has only limited countries that it has bank connections to (4-5 countries only), so this is another thing to take into account.

I definitely see a lot of opportunity for future use of Abowire, especially for companies that want to start selling quickly in the EU. The best use-cases would be companies with a bank account in the 4-5 countries that they are have integrations with and that don't mind an off-brand experience when users check-out.

Disclaimer:
As part of the AppSumo Early Review program Beta, I received this deal for free in exchange for an honest review.