A short guide to subscription billing

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about subscription billing in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Why this earns attention

Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What good looks like

Make cancelling easy or you will earn chargebacks instead. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The mistakes we see most

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

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
• 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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.