Recharge’s subscription widget helps you do exactly that. It gives you the tools to highlight your subscription offering, match it to your brand, and test what works best, all right from your product page. 

Here are three simple ways to convert more subscribers.

1. Make subscriptions the default decision

When people shop, especially for a new product or with a new brand, they tend to go with what’s easiest. That’s often the first option they see. That’s why setting subscriptions to the default purchase option on your product pages can make such a big difference—it takes the friction out of subscriptions and makes them the smart, simple choice.

It works: Brands that lead with subscriptions on their PDPs earn 4 times more subscribers than those that don’t.

Try this

Make subscriptions the default option on your PDPs, and make sure to highlight subscription benefits with, for example, a “Save 20%” badge. The easier you make it to subscribe, the more likely shoppers are to opt in.

2. Design for your brand, test for results

Your subscription widget shouldn’t feel like an afterthought; it should feel like an integrated, intentional part of the shopping experience. It’s often a customer’s introduction to the idea of subscribing, so it deserves the same care and intention as the rest of your site. A well-designed widget reinforces your brand and clearly communicates why subscribing is the better choice.

Try this

Make sure your widget matches your brand by adjusting fonts, colors, and tone. Integrate social proof to help customers purchase confidently. Keep the copy simple, focusing on perks like free shipping, discounts, flexible delivery, or surprise gifts.

Then test your widget’s performance to optimize it, experimenting with different aspects:

• Copy. Elevate different subscription perks to see which are the most compelling.
• Visual style. Test bold colors or quiet consistency to see what drives more engagement.
• CTAs. Test traditional discount-led CTAs like “Subscribe & save” against perk-driven options like “Subscribe for exclusive perks.”

3. Find your conversion sweet spot with testing

Not all discounts deliver the same impact. A 10% offer might not move the needle, while a 15% offer could significantly boost conversions. The key is finding the right balance between value for the customer and sustainable growth for your business. A/B testing gives you the data to make confident, performance-driven decisions, not guesses.

Try this

Run a simple, structured A/B test to optimize your discount offer.

1. Set your discount offers
   We recommend testing your current subscription offer against an offer 5% higher, e.g. 10% off vs. 15% off.
2. Run the test for at least two weeks
   Give the test enough time to collect meaningful data and reduce noise
3. Track key metrics to find the winner
   Focus on metrics like subscription opt-in rate, total revenue, and conversion rate to identify your top performer.
4. Set the winning variant as the default
   Apply the top-performing version as the default on your PDP to drive the best results.

Start turning shoppers into subscribers

Subscriptions offer more than just convenience—they build long-term relationships between brands and customers. Subscribers stay longer, order more often, and become your most valuable customers.

Your product page plays a key role in driving subscriptions. By leading with a subscription-first experience, aligning it with your brand, and testing what performs best, you create a clear path to more subscription revenue.

Start using Recharge’s subscription widget to put these best practices into action.

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What are failed payments and why do they matter?

Failed payments are transactions that are not successfully processed for a variety of reasons, such as insufficient funds, expired credit cards, or technical issues with payment gateways.

These failed payments are critical to address because they can interrupt financial operations and frustrate customers. Your business should monitor payment failures to maximize your revenue potential and stay ahead of competitors. 

Subscriptions magnify payment failure issues

On average, 7% of all recurring charges fail on the first attempt, and their effect is even more pronounced on subscription orders. When a subscription payment fails, you don’t just lose the revenue from that payment—you lose the revenue from all of the subsequent subscription orders that would have been placed if that payment had been processed successfully.

This loss of subscription revenue due to failed payments is effectively a form of subscription cancellation known as passive churn. Failed payments demand immediate attention and effective resolution to prevent them from becoming a significant drain on subscription revenue.

The drivers of failed payments

Most failed payments come from a few common sources.

Incorrect information

Errors like inaccurate card numbers, expiration dates, or billing addresses can cause issues during payment.

Card errors

Insufficient funds or exceeded credit limits can result in a financial institution declining payment for a subscription.

Customer forgetfulness

Some customers simply forget to provide updated payment method information when it’s available.

The problem with manual solutions

Manual solutions make addressing involuntary churn ineffective and time consuming. Many brands manually contact customers about payment failure and have payment systems that simply retry payment over and over, both of which require extra resources and produce less effective results.

Top brands are now pivoting to automated tools that have smart payment processing, timely communication, and analytics to discover when and how charge errors happen.

How top merchants solve failed payments

To minimize customer outreach, maximize your hit rate, and retain customers, use a smart solution that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to determine the best time to recover failed payments.

Recharge’s Failed Payment Recovery leverages a custom machine learning model trained on Recharge’s 20,000 merchants and 1.3 million daily transactions to find the optimal time to recover a payment. Our model looks at data including (but not limited to) the type of error, time elapsed since the first retry, and the time of the month or week that retries are most likely to be most effective on.

Effective results

Merchants who have switched to Failed Payment Recovery from our standard dunning solution are already seeing up to a 23% increase in their recovery rate. That means more customer lifetime value (LTV)  and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) retained for those businesses.

Frictionless experience

Thanks to Recharge’s partnership with Shopify, Failed Payment Recovery enables customers to update payment information directly in the customer portal.

This exclusive feature, available only for Shopify Checkout users, eliminates friction from the process, getting payments back on track seamlessly.

Seamless, on-brand communications

Failed Payment Recovery lets you send timely notifications equipped with templates that increase in urgency based on where a failed charge is in recovery. You can even take full control of your notifications by customizing the copy, branding, and HTML and CSS.

Smarter analytics

Use Failed Payment Recovery’s in-depth analytics to understand how and when your payments are recovered. Track your aggregate recovery rate and revenue saved, analyze the daily patterns of when and how your charges are recovered, and track how often payments are recovered via reattempts and payment method updates.

What to do if you’re losing revenue and subscribers

Many brands don’t realize how big an impact payment failures can have on their customer retention. And many of those that do still haven’t implemented smart solutions like Recharge’s to automate and optimize payment recovery processes. Top brands have recovered up to 50% more revenue from failed payments after switching to Failed Payment Recovery.

In a competitive landscape, it’s critical to actively seek out solutions that enhance your customer LTV and MRR. Don’t let involuntary churn erode your hard-earned subscriber base and revenue—implement a smart solution like Failed Payment Recovery to make payment failures a problem of the past.

The post Failed payments: What they are and how to solve them appeared first on Recharge.

At Recharge, we prioritize listening to you and integrating your feature requests into our platform. Our latest addition is a suite of cancellation prevention and customer retention tools designed to help you reduce subscriber churn effectively.

Subscriber churn poses a significant threat to the success of any subscription business. Imagine your business as a bucket you’re trying to fill with water. If there are holes in the bucket, water constantly escapes, preventing you from keeping it full. Subscriber churn works the same way—it negates your sales and marketing efforts with each cancellation. Acquiring a new customer costs significantly more than keeping an existing one, making the battle against churn crucial for efficiency and growth. Regardless of how many new customers you acquire, if you’re losing them at a higher rate, your efforts are in vain. Since 25 out of 26 unhappy customers churn without ever complaining, automated tools to prevent churn and get more insight into why customers are churning are essential.

Introducing our automated cancellation prevention tool

Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention is an easy-to-use tool designed to effectively reduce active churn by offering customers personalized incentives when they attempt to cancel their subscriptions. It also provides insights into the root causes of active churn and strategies to mitigate it. Top brands using Cancellation Prevention have already seen up to a 44% decrease in churn.

Three Highlights of Cancellation Prevention

• Prevent subscriber churn with personalized offers.
  • Offer large discounts to high-spend customers, tailor cancellation reasons based on products, or A/B test offers to determine what effectively retains customers. The possibilities are endless.
• Build a unique cancellation journey that is consistent with your brand.
  • Customize text, colors, format, and embed videos—all without needing to write a line of code. Alternatively, leverage HTML for further customization.

• Leverage AI-powered analytics that uncover the “why” behind your cancellations.
  • Analyze data on top-performing offers and product-specific cancellation reasons. RechargeAI surfaces the underlying reasons behind customer cancellations, providing actionable insights to prevent future losses.

Deepen your cancellation prevention tactics with rewards

Take your cancellation prevention to the next level with our new Rewards feature. This tool builds loyalty throughout the subscriber lifecycle by offering incentives that encourage repeat orders. When both Rewards and Cancellation Prevention are enabled, you can re-engage customers at the moment they’re attempting to cancel with previews of benefits or gifts they’re about to unlock or reminders of unused rewards they’re at risk of losing.

Learn more about our Cancellation Prevention and other retention tools here.

The post How to use Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention and customer retention tool appeared first on Recharge.