eCommerce Subscriptions Are Here to Stay

After the huge success of the subscription models of the media, digital marketing, gaming, streaming services, and OTT ventures, more online businesses leaped into the arena of the subscription e-Commerce. And, within few years, we have witnessed that businesses from across the industries—online stores, membership services, hospitality, automobiles, education, health, banking, commerce, trade, etc. have found revenue opportunities in subscription business models and began incorporating it one way or another into their revenue streams to boost their business growth.

The Rapidly Dominating E-Commerce Subscription Economy

Selling a product or service online on a recurring basis is an e-commerce subscription business. Today, different types of e-commerce subscription businesses have already taken the hold in their respective sectors and are continuing to grow. Some of the most popular include

Entertainment and OTT Subscriptions
Education & Online Learning Subscriptions
Telemedicine & Telehealth Subscription
Commodity Goods Subscriptions
Subscription Boxes
Software and SaaS Subscriptions

Subscription e-commerce businesses, in the last five years only, minted a fortune of more than $2.6B Revenue. It states one thing clear, not only today but tomorrow also belongs to the subscription service economy. And, the bigwigs have also started to gauge the fact.

After the ‘Major Players’ of the global economy like Nike, Coca-Cola, Mercato, Tesla, GNC, and others have stepped into the e-commerce subscriptions, recently, the social media giant Twitter says that it is also looking for some subscription options as ad revenues have been dropping, sharply.

This happened due to the change in consumer preferences.

The preferences of this new-gen consumer demand variance, novelty, accessibility, and availability. Marketing and sales statistics suggest they prefer easy and immediate access to the latest product and the technology and can’t hold the urge. They choose to subscribe to a product or service and use it, instead of owning it.

Realizing the paradigm shift in consumer shopping and purchasing preferences, finally, the verticals from across the sectors are convinced that E-Commerce Subscriptions is a thing that is going to stay here, maybe, forever. It is good news and, to some extent, it is also worrisome.

The global economy is on the brink of seeing a change in the ways of doing businesses and offering services. The new e-commerce subscription economy is going to challenge the monopolies of the big shots. The small ventures are more likely to power their recurring revenue business if they are equipped with the futuristic products and services, right Fintech stack with the innovation of automation and machine learning, and flexible business strategies.

Optimizing the E-Commerce Subscription Businesses

E-Commerce Subscriptions are intricate and challenging in their dynamic states. Despite, companies are willing to switch to subscription models, the recurring execution and management while dealing with the competition resist them to embrace the much-required and inevitable change.

E-Commerce subscriptions require businesses to devise minimal business strategies to allow their recurring revenue to grow with more stability and predictability. Using fewer resources to yield more profits and growth, it is essential to formulate robust recurring billing and subscription management.

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E-Commerce subscription services while focusing on the following key areas can upscale businesses and lift the recurring revenue in an upward direction only:

Easy and Efficient ECommerce Subscription Billing Platform

The subscription business is based on the customer’s consistency and recurrence demand. The repeated demand means repeated invoicing, billing, and payment processing. Configuring an easy and efficient stack that can help you get rid of the repeated manual doings by automating the whole billing process without your regular guidance is not only great assistance, it will also fuel your subscription service efficiency with transparency and accuracy. SubscriptionFlow allows you to take complete control of your subscription billing system. Create, custom, or send an invoice, adjust the changes in the subscription plan, charge payments, process the payments to the merchant’s accounts, handle dunning, or keeping the record of transactions—it can manage all on auto-pilot mode.

It adds an extra layer of assistance with the modules that auto-manages the global sales tax, refunds, credits, incentives like coupons and vouchers, etc.

Pricing Experimentation

Pricing plays a key role in acquisitions and retention. Setting prices for once does not work with e-commerce subscription businesses. The increasing competition in the subscription economy has also exerted more pressure on pricing and pricing models experimentation. SubscriptionFlow offers AI-mediated pricing and plan cataloging modules that assist in easy, instant, and efficient experimentation of subscription pricing.

Complex Subscriptions & Billing Management

The other key area of challenge for the e-commerce subscription businesses is maintaining a powerful, intuitive, and effective complex subscription management system that empowers the customers to steer their subscription cycle. For any reason, the subscriber can cut the cords of subscription. The solution to this problem is flexible subscription management like SubscriptionFlow that allows subscribers to self-manage the upgrade, downgrade, pause, postpone, or cancel the subscriptions anytime as per their convenience and bill them accordingly. This accessibility of proration with unchallenged accuracy and transparency favors trust and eventually strong customer relationships and brand loyalty.

Proactive Engagement with Customer Base

Customer support has always been the core element of any business. It is inevitable for any business. Ecommerce Subscription business depends on customer retention that requires impeccable customer relationships. Keeping customers in the loop at every stage by offering personalized pricing or service to plan upscale promotion to bestowing marketing and sales incentives to sending invoices and payment notifications would ensure intact and strong communications with the customer base and reduces the chances of churn. SubscriptionFlow is far more evolved than a regular billing system. It allows you to send automated and personalized invoices, payment processing notification, payment retries, and other emails with no extra cost and no additional effort.

Integrations to Streamline Marketing, Sales, Fulfilment, & Other RevOps

Ecommerce subscription businesses require more streamlined RevOps. Integrating the marketing and sales, accounting and finance, order fulfillment, and support applications help subscription billing management platform to peddle data-driven revenue operations. SubscriptionFlow is a highly extensible platform that allows you to integrate any stack with it or within the other CRM or ERPs to offer run-time subscription business management across the board.

Revenue Recognition & Real-Time Reporting

Simple and smart Revenue Recognition is the prime attraction of the e-commerce subscription business as its scaling does not depend on acquisitions only. The recurring revenue stability comes with the factor of predictability associated with customer retention that empowers the subscription economy. Though, with the subscription services of physical goods, it removes the element of accuracy as the subscription revenue fluctuates with the fulfillment and operational costs.

The emergence of artificial intelligence brought a revolution in comprehending and managing the uncleared and unstructured data sets. Using AI technology, SubscriptionFlow allows the nearest accuracy in Revenue Recognition and reflects in its real-time recurring revenue reporting as well. The real-time reporting also features SaaS monitoring metrics, identification of revenue losses and leakages, and many more.