How to Master Recurring Billing for eCommerce Product Subscriptions

Shoppers today are subscribing to the products they love. Subscriptions are taking over everything: from meal kits and grooming products to coffee refills and magazines. One-off purchases aren’t enough for customer satisfaction today, and ecommerce businesses are already capitalizing on this shift.

They are taking their revenue to new heights by securing long-term customer commitment through subscriptions. If you’re an ecommerce merchant, or aspiring to become one, it’s important for you to know how exactly you can master your subscription game.

So let’s highlight some effective strategies that make your recurring billing top-notch, so that you keep on giving your customers the purchase experience they deserve.

#1 Establish a strong recurring billing backbone

First and foremost, businesses interested in selling subscriptions need to ensure that they have the billing infrastructure for that. A software purpose-built for recurring billing is right what they need. That’s because ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Wix don’t fully support recurring payments themselves. The most they do is allow merchants to charge on a recurring basis.

But the more advanced functionalities like:

multi-payment gateway payment routing
payment failure retries
advanced analytics &
diverse payment models

are absent. And growing businesses need such features to make their operations as efficient as possible. Missing such must-have features and relying on manual patch-ups can create gaps for revenue to leak through. Instead of unreliable manual fixes, merchants should partner with a strong billing app. Such as SubscriptionFlow.

This app integrates with ecommerce stores, captures their customers’ data at sign up, creates their invoices, activates their billing cycles, and manage their complete subscription lifecycles. Best of all, all these tasks are handled automatically to maintain quick cash in-flows and prevent payment delays.

Once you acquire strong billing, you can charge with more clarity and confidence. This not only lessens the chances of disputes, but also keeps customers connected to your store for long time periods.

#2 Nail the checkout experience

Checkout is an important point in the purchase process, and must be made frictionless. Otherwise, issues like cart abandonment arise that drive potential subscribers away. A customer’s checkout experience plays a huge role in determining whether they will actually subscribe or just walk away.

Checkout experiences become rough due to various reasons. Like slow loading speed, lack of theme coordination with the store, one currency for all, limited payment options, account creation requirements, etc.

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These shortcomings don’t let the checkout appear welcoming and flexible, hence driving customers away. So that is something that businesses need to work on. Now ecommerce platforms do offer their own checkout setups but they aren’t especially optimized for subscriptions.

In such scenarios, merchants can adopt external, more flexible checkouts (like SubscriptionFlow’s) that adapt to their store seamlessly. These checkouts offer advanced, subscription-specific options to customers. For example, more payment methods, variety of plans to select from, changing cart products right at checkout, and more.

Great checkout experiences are sure to convert. They make paying easy, and also allow users to apply coupon codes to their products for discounts. They also present the subscription terms and conditions clearly, acquiring user consent for auto-recurring billing.

#3 Make subscription plans flexible (add diversity, give discounts)

Give customers choices in terms of subscription plans. Plan diversity taps into consumer psychology well, and guides them toward the option they perceive as most valuable. This way, it increases acquisition chances by letting customers feel in control.

Merchants can segment their subscription plans on the basis of duration (weekly, monthly, quarterly) or features (each plan contains different product types or quantity). For example, a disposable kitchen towels store may give customers the option to re-stock 4 rolls, 8 rolls, or 16 rolls per month.

It may allow customers to “save 5%” by reducing the price per roll in higher tiers. This discount will effectively draw customers toward the second or third tier, locking in more revenue for the merchant.

#4 Simplify payment recovery

Failed payments shouldn’t be taken lightly, and shouldn’t simply be left for employees to resolve manually. Manual resolution is time-taking, and in the case of unresponsive customers, it becomes ineffective as well. The best way to deal with failures is to have a dunning system in place.

Advanced billing apps give merchants access to dunning tools using which they can retry payments, send escalating emails, suspend accounts, and more. These tactics improve payment recovery rates and prevent customers from dropping out of subscription involuntarily.

Software like SubscriptionFlow executes AI-powered payment recovery that boosts success chances further. The software learns from the past recovery efforts, determines the best time for making a retry attempt, and convinces customers to use those alternate payment options that have higher success rates.

#5 Build a strong integration stack to keep operations tied together

Merchants need a strong integration stack to keep their workflows united and in sync. They should go for billing software that connects with external platforms easily, or provides built-in connectors that don’t require developer support.

So, the billing software basically becomes the central point of connection for the external apps. It connects with ecommerce sites, CRMs, fulfillment tools, and accounting software. And it syncs billing information across all the platforms so that no data silos are created. Merchants get to maintain clean and readily-accessible customer databases and financial records.

Choose SubscriptionFlow for an All-in-One eCommerce Billing Solution

Recurring billing for ecommerce product subscriptions has never been easier. With SubscriptionFlow, you get to implement smart billing strategies that fuel your store’s growth. Whether you are a Shopify merchant, or sell through Wix, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce or another platform, SubscriptionFlow has you covered. You can access its app or plugin across a wide range of ecommerce sites.

Using this software, you can unlock these additional features:

Multiple currency and payment option support at checkout

Accepting payments in only one currency and only through a few payment options isn’t user-friendly. It can especially deter international customers from coming on board. To make checkout more welcoming, SubscriptionFlow allows you to accept multi-currency payments through multiple payment methods.

Merchants can enable all of the supported methods at the same time and smartly deploy options according to the customer’s location for higher conversion.

Subscription bundle support

Bundles are popular in the subscription product category. They allow users to choose a mixture of items from your store, and tie all of them together in a single subscription. Similar to how a subscription box works. The difference is that a bundle is more dynamic and gives users build-your-own box options.

Letting users create their own bundle also means that merchants don’t have to self-curate different product combinations into different plans. Which means that they can maintain a cleaner and simpler product catalogue.

If customers want to change or remove items before payment, they can do that at checkout. If they want to make changes after payment, they can use their self-service portal for that, and get their bills adjusted.

Gift subscription option

Gift subscription can be offered as a separate plan, especially popular with magazines. When gift plans are chosen, customers are taken to special checkout pages where they can fill out the details of the gift recipient as well. For example, recipient name, email, and address. Sender can also customize gift duration and add personalized messages for the recipient.

Single checkout page

Why make customers go through multiple checkout steps when they can fill out all the required data on one page? SubscriptionFlow ensures that your checkout demands only that information that you actually need for billing. Because additional fields mean unnecessary obstacles between your customer and subscription.

Fulfillment support

The billing software supports your fulfillment provider in various ways. When it renews subscriptions, it creates new fulfillment tasks automatically, so your provider knows when the next batch of deliveries is due. It shares the latest customer information with it too, so your fulfillment platform creates accurate shipping labels.

Do these billing features speak to your needs? Join the community of successful merchants using SubscriptionFlow, and master your recurring billing strategy now.