Thinking Differently About Subscription
Why Subscription Should Be More Than Just Auto-Replenishment
According to the website Resilience.org the film My Octopus Teacher is "both a gorgeous wildlife documentary and a moving tale of how a man in crisis found joy and purpose through immersion in nature and a remarkable relationship with an octopus." Almost all other reviews were fairly similar and just as positive. And then there are the few, like the one from Pippa Bailey from New Statesman Magazine that - as it were - swam against the current: "Must we view an octopus as a friend, a savior, a teacher? Couldn't we simply settle for not eating them?"
A man's self-discovery in the arms of an octopus is something that seemingly everyone can embrace, right? Less so a sperm whale – I'm looking at you, Moby Dick – but both carry sizable underlying messages, and neither are really about adventures with our undersea friends. They serve as a reminder that, while something seems to be about one thing, it can very easily lead you to many different – but related – moments of discovery.
What this has to do with e-commerce is that subscription - that most fundamental of all e-commerce add-on capabilities - is not really about e-commerce at all. Subscription is more valuable when viewed as an excuse to create an exceptional consumer experience without being prompted. I propose that subscription is among the least fully understood of all the e-commerce features. The insights that drive it seem to be from the inside out: "I just know people will want this" instead of "our consumer insights are telling us people want to have a way of being replenished automatically". Yes it's conveniently automatic, but is that all? When it runs perfectly, e-commerce subscription disappears from the consumer's attention span.
Our question becomes, instead of striving for invisibility in the consumer experience, can subscription not also carve out a place for your brand in the hearts and minds of your consumers? I believe the answer can be, “YES!!”
Defining Subscription
When most of us think about subscription, we think about an auto-replenishment of something we use up, like diapers or clothes washing liquid. There are also some subscription services that deal in items we do consume but don't use up, like books. Since long before the advent of e-commerce there have been services that enabled a consumer to sign up for a timed delivery of something that, instead of being used up would contribute to a collection, such as porcelain figurines. A subscription for an online publication - or an e-commerce facility to enable a print publication being mailed to you - is another model. Finally, offering paid access to online content (i.e. Patreon or OnlyFans) is, in fact, a kind of subscription because they are usually packaged as a monthly regular fee that can be managed for multiple months in one transaction, usually representing a savings for the consumer.
To further the nothing new-ness of all this, almost all subscription programs leverage one or more of these 3 basic appeals:
Set it and forget it.
We'll be there when you need us.
Subscribe and save.
To be fair, the presence of subscription in an e-commerce facility provides very positive, tangible, business and consumer benefits. In a 2021 article on the subscription model, the US publication Forbes Magazine put it most succinctly: "Compare the average profile of a subscriber and a transactional customer. The transactional customer tends to have lower brand loyalty and a higher churn rate, they also cost more to acquire. Compare this to a subscription service customer who has higher retention and lifetime value; the bonus this business model offers to brands is obvious." More and more businesses are offering a subscription of some kind. According to research by UnivDatos, the global eCommerce subscription market is expected to hit 13.56 trillion reais (USD $2.64 trillion) by 2028.