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:

In today’s blog, we’re continuing our discussion about dunning. As a reminder, dunning is the process of communicating with customers (usually by email) to try to collect payments due. In effect, discussions about dunning are really discussions about these customer communications.

In our last blog, we described how the dunning process works at each step and the decisions the merchant can make which can optimize the process and improve results. We also outlined how Recurly’s dunning process is more effective.

In our previous post in this series, we discussed the importance of reducing the friction that occurs during the subscriber lifecycle in order to promote and support continued revenue growth. We focused on free trials as a way to reduce sign-up friction in that post.  

But friction at sign-up is only one touch-point in the subscriber lifecycle. In order to extend the lifetime of your subscribers, you must look for and reduce points of friction throughout their entire lifecycle, from engagement through retention.

In light of Netflix’s recently announced pricing changes last month, this seems a good opportunity to talk about price increases as a point of friction.

One of the main challenges subscription businesses face is churn, which lowers the number of subscribers  and monthly recurring revenue. The two types of churn are voluntary and involuntary, and because each is driven by entirely different things, as a subscription business, you need to take different steps to mitigate each type of churn.

Businesses are always looking for ways to make it easier for customers to interact and make purchases. Starbucks launched a mobile ordering system nationwide in 2015, letting customers avoid the long lines at the store by using the Starbucks app to place their order which is then waiting for them when they come into the store. Tesco, a UK grocery store chain, recently debuted their “Scan As You Shop” system where customers use a handset to scan their own items and then put them directly into their bags in their shopping cart.