Getting started with subscription billing
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A short on-ramp to subscription billing for teams who have not touched it before.
In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
What it costs to ignore
Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Make cancelling easy or you will earn chargebacks instead
- Change one thing and measure it
Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
How to tell if yours is fine
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about subscription billing before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.