Subscription Digest

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...

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.”  ~ Voltaire Next week, we’ll be launching the first of several blog posts about data—specifically about how our customers can use their data in Recurly to improve and optimize their business. Our first post focuses on churn, which is always...

In the best of circumstances, financial reporting can be a complicated and sometimes difficult task. Accuracy is critical but not always easy to achieve. Subscription-based businesses face added challenges in accurately recognizing revenue. The business may have different billing models with different terms, have numerous customer upgrades and downgrades that need...

Returnloads.net is an online freight exchange in the UK. They connect haulage companies who have empty vehicles with businesses that need goods moved—helping to reduce costs along with the number of empty trucks traveling throughout the U.K. ReturnLoads is also a Recurly customer and one that’s so happy with the...

As any subscription business knows, recurring billing is complex and presents many challenges that billing for a one-time purchase does not. Different billing models, mid-month upgrades and downgrades, add-on charges, etc. all add to the complexity. From an accounting and finance standpoint, accurate reporting each month is complicated by these...