Customer retention is critical for eCommerce businesses because high churn rates continue to be a major challenge. While there are numerous methods to build a long-term relationship with customers, one of the more straightforward methods that help improve customer retention is implementing recurring payments. eCommerce subscription management is an important process in today’s SaaS world and B2B marketplace.
Recurring payments allow you to sell the same product at regular intervals rather than just once. It’s one of the major reasons why established eCommerce brands like Gillette and Walmart have launched subscription services to stay competitive.
Integration of Order Fulfillment
Subscriptions, order details, and fulfillment modes are the three major spokes that keep your online store operational wheels turning. And you must set up systems to ensure that they communicate with one another in perfect harmony. Managing reconciliations between the 3 manually, with exports and uploads of excel sheets, create a risk of dropping the ball due to human error and not realizing the loss until it’s too late.
Order fulfillment and powerful inventory integrations allow you to project the right stocks and quantities in your store and track every shipment all the way to delivery.
Taxation, currency, and language
The complexities of managing taxes and compliance issues grow exponentially as you scale your markets and expand into new geographies. When do you transition from having your finance team manage all of these complexities every time a subscription is invoiced to automating everything through your underlying billing infrastructure?
Successful subscription e-commerce businesses ensure that the personal touch is maintained even at scale. That means you must have systems in place to accommodate minor details, such as localizing customer communications in their respective languages, billing in multiple currencies, and providing a variety of payment methods, before they become a barrier to your growth.
Cancellations, Refunds, and Returns
Product returns and refunds are an excellent way to alleviate objections and encourage more prospects to try your service. After all, eCommerce subscription management claims that its best customers are the ones who return the most products.
However, handling refunds on an ad hoc customer-by-customer basis can quickly become out of hand. Not to mention the financial and accounting can of worms that would be opened. Whether it’s dissatisfaction, write-offs, upgrades or downgrades, or simply a good customer experience practice – ensuring that returns, refunds, and cancellations are deeply integrated into your billing system allows your business policies to flow from the customer experience to the accounting ledger.
Checkout procedure
Subscription box businesses must keep their checkout flow simple. A “Buy now” button that directs the user to the payment page is far more efficient than an elaborate “cart checkout” flow that introduces unnecessary friction.
Some eCommerce platforms require you to use the stock checkout feature, which is difficult to customize. This checkout flow is typically optimized for the eCommerce platform rather than your specific business requirements. You can use powerful APIs to create a checkout flow that is optimized for your identified user personas and your business.
Notification and Communication Segmentation
Subscription e-commerce is all about the experience; the more targeted and personalized your efforts, the better. Billing systems have progressed from record keepers to excellent acquisition and retention tools. They enable you to segment your audience based on location, card abandonment, purchase history, plans, and more, allowing you to engage your customer base proactively through timely notifications.
Complex Subscription Management for eCommerce
You don’t need millions of customers to run into scaling issues. And no matter what you do, it will hurt when the first customer cancels their account and leaves. A lot.
However, complex subscription management capabilities such as pausing a subscription, extending subscription periods, and allowing customers to upgrade, downgrade, or manage their accounts can provide you with a few more levers to prevent churn.
Various Payment Options
As you scale and add a more diverse customer base, you’ll notice that different customer segments are more comfortable with different payment options. Customers who want to shop on the go will appreciate digital wallets like Amazon Pay and Apple Pay, while PayPal allows you to offer a flexible payment method to global customers. You’d also need to accept credit card payments and, as you move into higher-value purchases, perhaps allow customers to pay with direct debit.
However, adding multiple payment methods is one of those things that cannot be added as an afterthought. You wouldn’t want to restructure your entire billing system and operations just to add a new payment method, would you?
Subscription Management Platform for eCommerce
If you are looking for an eCommerce subscription management platform then SubscriptionFlow is the right answer.
SubscriptionFlow is a subscription management platform that afterlooks the eCommerce subscription processes such as invoicing, billing, and payment methods. With the customization provided by SubscriptionFlow you can create custom fields and columns to manage your eCommerce business.
Head over to SubscriptionFlow and schedule a demo with them, now for your eCommerce subscription management.
