Teamup

TeamUp started as a consumer-facing business tool, which has grown into one of the leading fitness industry-focused business platforms. The company has developed through listening to customers and implementing feature upgrades that have made their customers more successful.

Five years later, thousands of fitness professionals now rely on TeamUp to make sure their customers have a friction-free experience with their business.

“Like any new business, establishing a foothold and making your first customers happy is an energetic and exciting process, but not without its challenges. Early on we realised that reliable payment processing was absolutely crucial to that experience,” says Tim.

Discovering Direct Debit

After experimenting with different methods, TeamUp discovered GoCardless and developed a custom integration around its Direct Debit payment software.

According to TeamUp, the main benefit for any business of working with GoCardless is the incredibly stable and reliable platform. TeamUp operates completely via the API, and has built additional functionality on top of the integration to help fitness customers.

Any business can benefit from simply signing up and using the dashboard for recurring payments, without long-term commitment. In fact, TeamUp encourages new businesses to do this for starters, and then when they’re ready, upgrade to TeamUp to add the extra functionality that the company offers.

If you are currently offering credit cards, or just want to get started, then the GoCardless Direct Debit system will allow you to offer your clients a professional way to pay you.

Integrating the GoCardless API

Integrating GoCardless as a partner has been simple for TeamUp.

“The key is the professional team behind the platform. The API has developed, and for any capable team, it’s simple to integrate into existing payment flows. With a growing number of partners, it should be possible to find a way to simply click and be immediately live – like with TeamUp for fitness and class-based businesses,” said Tim.

Building an integration from scratch

TeamUp’s developers were impressed with the speed and convenience of integrating GoCardless into their existing software, even with a part-time team. The result was a fully integrated Direct Debit solution with no manual reporting. “It took approximately six weeks from having nothing to having a fully functional GoCardless integration. It was all built in-house using the Python library.”

“We exchanged a lot of emails with GoCardless developer support, sorting out questions and issues. They were helpful as always.” The team at TeamUp were especially pleased that partnering with GoCardless allowed them to extend the TeamUp product offering. GoCardless added extra value to make the product even more useful for TeamUp customers.

According to Tim, the fitness industry is micro-niching at some pace. This development is an exciting one for TeamUp not just because the company helps small to medium businesses grow, but also because it’s full of fitness enthusiasts.

TeamUp also sees a huge rise in franchise businesses, so it has developed a special franchise management platform that helps both franchisors and franchisees operate with the same ease as any of its customers.

This platform includes custom reporting, revenue share payment management and more. On top of that, TeamUp uses GoCardless as the mechanism, meaning that every size of business can also benefit from the same reliable payments as existing TeamUp customers.