Subscription billing: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about subscription billing this quarter, make it the first item below.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Start here

Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Then this

Make cancelling easy or you will earn chargebacks instead. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Eventually

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about subscription billing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.