Payments Recurring Payments

Why Should You Offer Subscription Services?

2018 August 28

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Why Should You Offer Subscription Services?

Internet users constantly come across various subscriptions and memberships such as weekly magazines, programs like antivirus software, beauty or food subscription boxes and many other goods and services.

What makes them so convenient is that you can charge your customers periodically without hassle and unnecessary reminders. All you need to do is to set up recurring billing in your system. If you still hesitate to do it, just imagine how time-saving and profitable it can be.

Benefits of subscription services

Think about the benefits it can bring you and your customers:

  • First of all, you will be able to predict your income flow and plan the future growth of your business. You will regularly charge your customers a determined sum. So, it will be easy for you to calculate how much money you will receive during a certain period of time.
  • You won’t have to remind your customers every week or month to pay for their orders, and your customers will always pay you on time. Therefore, you will not have to devote your effort to the tracking of late payments and will concentrate on doing sales.
  • Additionally, subscription billing gives your customers flexibility. You can customize and change plans to meet their needs. You have the freedom to set multiple billing periods and pricing levels, so that it would be possible for your customer to scale up or decrease the subscription price. Feel free to modify the payment amount, frequency, and currency.
  • Your customer will not need to log in to his account every time he wants to make a payment, as it will be charged automatically. This reduces the chance that he will cancel the subscription and will stop using your online services.
  • Provide free test trials. You can offer trying your service once for free. It will attract more buyers to stay as your loyal customers.
  • All the advantages mentioned above build trust and strong relationships between you and your buyers and increase customer retention.

Subscription is not only beneficial, but also easy to set up. Cardinity is ready to activate recurring payments in your account. You just need to specify in your application form that you are going to charge your customers periodically. Your buyer will need to fill in all the card details only when making the first payment. Further recurring charges will happen automatically using the generated payment reference ID.

Possible problems of subscription services and solutions to them

Even though there are many advantages of having this feature in your online shop, nothing is ideal. That is why you should always be ready to deal with the issues that may arise in the process. Here are some of the drawbacks of subscription services and suggestions for overcoming them:

  • Sometimes subscriptions may become boring. Delivering the same products or content for several months is not likely to bring much pleasure to your customers. Offer your customers a diversity of things and surprise them with something new and original.
  • It may be difficult to measure some services or goods you offer and to calculate the price for your subscription plan. You may struggle to set the price, as your work is still in progress. In this case, you should balance your workload and divide the total price equally.
  • If you offer subscriptions, you must ensure that you have items available to deliver and that you manage to provide your service on time. Otherwise, your customers will complain that the goods or services were not delivered and cancel the subscription.
  • Subscription businesses usually provide a very limited selection of goods and services, so it may be more difficult to drive traffic to the website. In this case, you can additionally offer various single items to buy and combine recurring and one-time payments.

E-Commerce websites that can activate subscription billing

The types of e-commerce websites that may need recurring billing are infinite. In fact, any type of business can offer subscription plans for various goods and services. Here are only some of the examples:

  • Subscription boxes of beauty products, food, beverages or merchandise.
  • Educational and training content, courses
  • Fitness centres and gyms
  • Newspapers, magazines, journals
  • Software platforms, web designers, marketing services
  • Consultations
  • Membership clubs
  • Utility companies
  • Vitamins & supplements subscription
  • Subscriptions to blogs or other content
  • Online dating websites
Types of subscription services

If you have any other business ideas on how to use recurring billing, feel free to apply for our merchant account here. Enjoy all the benefits of subscription payments free of charge!


Open a merchant account for free
and start processing payments with Cardinity!