Top Subscription Merchants Know That Flexibility Is Key

In the competitive retail subscription space, offering flexible plan options is strongly linked with merchants’ success.

By the Numbers

PYMNTS’ study “Decision Guide – How Retail Subscription Merchants Can Win and Retain High LTV Customers,” created in collaboration with sticky.io, examined how different subscription features line up with merchants’ performance.

The results revealed that 97% of top-performing retail subscription players offer the ability to make plan changes to delivery frequency — a share six times greater than the 13% of bottom performers that provide the same option.

Similarly, 100% of top performers provide consumers with the ability to pause service, while only 23% of bottom-performing merchants do the same.

Correlation is not causation, but these strong links suggest that offering flexible subscription options could be key to merchants’ success.

The Data in Context

In an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster earlier this year for the J.P. Morgan Payments Series: Global Innovators in Payments, sticky.io CEO Brian Bogosian discussed the rising demand for these kinds of variable options amid macroeconomic challenges.

“The bar continues to get higher,” he said. “People’s budgets are getting squeezed. People aren’t spending money frivolously. If they don’t get value, if they don’t get flexibility, if they don’t get incentives to continue, they’ll drop off.”

Offering consumers this degree of control can help merchants retain their loyalty without having to make changes to their pricing structure, as Seth Goldman, CEO of floral and gifting subscription firm UrbanStems, told Webster for a conversation in PYMNTS’ series “Tough Questions: Retaining the Selective Subscriber of 2023.”

“It’s less about bringing the price down and more about ensuring that what we’re delivering has a strong value-to-cost ratio for that consumer,” Goldman said. “For us, that’s continuing to lean into the features that make it more accessible and easier to work with. It’s improving customer service and also pushing on that emotional side of what we do.”