According to McKinsey, subscription e-commerce has grown 100% a year over the last five years. Savvy e-commerce companies are taking full advantage of the subscription model—predictable revenue and deep customer relationships—to gain a competitive advantage and accelerate growth.

We’ve all been there: waiting in line at the grocery store with one item behind someone with twenty. It’s frustrating. The checkout process in e-commerce can be frustrating too, and subscription businesses should do all they can to optimize and streamline this process for their subscribers. Why? Because eliminating friction from the checkout experience is a best practice and can increase conversions. What are some ways to do this?

Subscription businesses that want to optimize their payment process and gain an edge over their competition should consider integrating with a second payment gateway. A second gateway can offer increased operational efficiencies along with a variety of other benefits.

In today’s ever-evolving subscription commerce landscape, businesses must meet their subscribers’ present needs while also planning for how they will respond to future changes in the marketplace. The most successful businesses are those that have the flexibility to innovate, with solutions that are efficient and scalable.

Checkout abandonment is the ongoing bane of ecommerce companies. Many such companies have dedicated product and engineering teams continuously monitoring and finding ways to increase conversion rates at checkout. One key to increasing conversion rates is removing friction.

If you’re an e-commerce business, two of the most dreaded words you’ll hear are “card declined.” When a credit (or debit) card is declined, the sale can’t go through and you don’t earn that revenue. If you’re a subscription business processing a recurring payment, a declined card can also result in involuntary subscriber churn.

Subscription businesses work hard to provide their subscribers with value. Despite their best efforts, subscribers do cancel, sometimes due to things that are out of the business’ control. For example, perhaps the business is an OTT provider that streams certain sports. Since most sports are seasonal, during the off-season, the subscriber may not use the service and may opt to cancel. Or time and money constraints, or work or travel obligations prevent subscribers from using and enjoying their subscriptions.

In February, couples around the world plan for how to celebrate Valentine’s Day. While flowers and chocolate are time-tested testaments of affection, gift cards have become a popular choice in our more modern, e-commerce-driven times.

The New Year is a time to reflect on the year that has passed and plan for what lies ahead. At Recurly, it’s become our tradition to look back on our blog posts from the previous year and see which were the most popular. We’re always pleased to see how many clicks and shares our posts receive, and hope that our blog helps customers better use Recurly to manage and optimize their subscription business.

As we have discussed in the first and second blog in this series, dunning is a key process for maximizing revenue, and Recurly offers flexible tools to help you develop and manage your dunning strategy. In particular, Recurly users can set: