Sundar's Musings

You can find the rest of the series here:

Adventures in online subscription business : Part 1

The renewal failures in a online subscription business are a serious problem as they lead to lost customers who are otherwise happy with the product are are ready to pay. And this problem grows every day unless tackled on an urgent basis. Some ways to tackle it:

• Email the user on the first renewal failure but this has side effects of being seen as spam or being seen as an marketing email.
• Notify the customer inside the UI of the product itself and this way catch the user when he needs the product most. But one should not block the usr from using the product as this kind of a block when the user needs to use to the product leaves a bad taste in a user’s mouth.
• Proactively inform the user if the expiry date of the credit card is coming up and urge the user to update the credit card details
• Call the user on a renewal failure. We would use this as a measure of last resort. But this has the best conversion rate as the typically the user could be convinced to switch to the annual plan. But this involved setting up a tele-sales kind of operation and has higher costs.

Another thing to think about is that most merchants focus on the processing fees and try to minimize them when choosing a card processing vendor. But in our experience it would be more important to focus on the things like ability to re-try a transaction either manually or automatically or the reporting facility so that one can slide and dice the transactions and get an early heads-up if something is going wrong. Also some like BrainTree payments allow the ability to export/import the Credit Card details while most dont. 

You can find the rest of the series here:

Adventures in online subscription business : Part 1