Subscription Digest

In many communities, finding a babysitter or nanny is hard. Sittercity realized the challenges parents and others faced and launched a website to solve the problem, providing parents with a better, more effective way to find childcare. Founded in 2001, the service—which is accessed via a monthly subscription fee—has connected...

If you had a crystal ball that could tell you where the next major market for e-commerce will emerge, what would you do? Would you seize the opportunity to expand your business into this burgeoning market? The next boom in e-commerce may well be upon us, in Southeast Asia. This,...

The Internet of Things is transforming how we live, work, and play. Beyond the familiar ‘smart’ devices in our homes, such as thermostats and fitness trackers, the Internet of Things (IoT) has applications in a wide-ranging realm. There are devices that can find our lost phones and luggage, monitor our...

In e-commerce, transactions can fail for any number of reasons, and every time a transaction is declined, the business loses revenue. With subscription businesses, the problem is compounded by the fact that subscription revenue is recurring revenue. This makes effective management of billing and payments especially critical: any time a...

These days, most entrepreneurs and investors are quite clear about the merits of the subscription model. From a business perspective, recurring revenue is a wonderful concept. When a subscription business is firing on all cylinders, recurring revenue compounds beyond the costs of customer acquisition, and the world is the proprietor’s...

In our previous post in this series, we talked about the difference between cancellation and churn. The post outlined the different actions you can take when a customer cancels to try to prevent them from churning and how Recurly helps to identify these customers. Because we know you can’t prevent all...

The subscription model is one of the fastest-growing categories in e-commerce—which should come as no surprise given the many benefits that a recurring revenue business offers. While the model provides benefits, it also has inherent complexity. Businesses seeking to start a subscription business or add a subscription component to their...

A new version of Recurly’s API has been released! Version 2.5 comes with many improvements such as new endpoints, new request attributes, and new response attributes as well. Let’s dive in and take a look at what’s changed! First, we have a new endpoint for attempting a collection on an...

Credit cards are an extremely convenient way to pay for online purchases. However, subscription businesses can face challenges in successfully completing recurring payments via credit cards. This is because after the initial payment at signup, various factors can cause the recurring payments to fail. The most effective way to repair...

Do you know what your subscriber churn rate is? How about the median churn rate for your industry? Do you know the difference between churn and cancellation? And perhaps most importantly, do you know what you can do to try to prevent a customer who has cancelled from churning? Our...