Top-performing retail subscription merchants offer consumers more crowdsourced information about product quality than their bottom-performing counterparts, suggesting that offering this information could play a key role in merchant success.By the NumbersThe latest installment of the Decision Guide series by PYMNTS Intelligence, “The Retail Subscription Features That Make Top-Performing Merchants,” drew on a survey of 188 retail subscription merchants. It examined the relationship between loyal customers and merchant revenues to understand the best practices to expand this lucrative group of consumers.According to the study, 83% of top-performing merchants offered product ratings and reviews as part of their subscription services. In contrast, only 30% of bottom-performing merchants provided this feature. The difference suggests that the inclusion of product ratings and reviews plays a role in the success of retail subscription businesses.A Deeper DiveThese kinds of reviews and ratings only drive success if they are reliable. The PYMNTS Intelligence study “The Replenish Economy: A Household Supply Deep Dive” drew from a September survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers, It found that inaccurate or misleading ratings and reviews can contribute to consumers hitting unsubscribe, especially scheduled delivery and auto-fill subscribers.“At the end of the day, it’s about trust,” Alex Brown, president of sustainable cleaning supplies subscription firm Truly Free, told PYMNTS in May for the series “Tough Questions: Retaining the Selective Subscriber of 2023.Establishing that trust can go a long way toward building long-term loyalty.“Consumers will continue to expect satisfying eCommerce experiences that are seamless, smooth and trustworthy,” Vindicia Head of Customer Success Meena Srinivasan told PYMNTS in an interview in February

Top-performing retail subscription merchants offer their customers the option to take a step back, while merchants that do not provide this kind of flexibility tend to struggle.By the NumbersThe December installment of the Decision Guide report, “The Retail Subscription Features That Make Top-Performing Merchants,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and sticky.io collaboration, drew from a survey of 188 retail subscription merchants in September. It examined, among other matters, how various features relate to merchants’ performance.The results revealed that offering consumers flexible options is strongly linked to subscription providers’ success. For instance, 100% of top-performing merchants offer the option to pause or skip, while only 20% of bottom performers do the same.A Deeper DiveFlexible plan options are increasingly becoming table stakes. PYMNTS Intelligence and sticky.io’s study released last month “The Replenish Economy: A Household Supply Deep Dive” revealed that three-quarters of retail subscription merchants allow existing subscribers to change their plans whenever they would like.Alex Brown, CEO of sustainable cleaning supplies subscription firm Truly Free, noted to PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in a conversation for the series “Tough Questions: Retaining the Selective Subscriber of 2023,” that offering this kind of flexibility is vital to establishing strong relationships with customers.“Allowing people to see that they can pause or cancel or have this full control over their subscription is what delivered more trust,” Brown said in May. “At the end of the day, it’s about trust.”In the same conversation, sticky.io CEO Brian Bogosian discussed the different kinds of flexibility that consumers are coming to expect.“Flexibility is key,” he said. “Flexibility to not only be able to cancel, but to pause, replace products, move to a different tier, as much flexibility as can be provided … extends that customer’s lifetime value.”

A new lawsuit accuses SiriusXM of making it too hard for customers to cancel subscriptions.The suit, filed against the satellite radio service Wednesday (Dec. 20) by the New York attorney general, said SiriusXM maintains a “deliberately long and burdensome” cancellation process.According to a news release, the attorney general’s investigation found that the company “forces its subscribers to call or chat online with an agent” to cancel subscriptions and deliberately draws out those interactions to keep subscribers from canceling.“Having to endure a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden no one looks forward to, and when companies make it hard to cancel subscriptions, it’s illegal,” said Attorney General Letitia James.“Consumers should be able to cancel a subscription they no longer use or need without any issues, and companies have a legal duty to make their cancellation process easy.”The lawsuit seeks restitution, penalties, and disgorgement from SiriusXM for violating New York’s business laws.“It’s telling that the New York Attorney General issued a press release before providing SiriusXM with a copy of the complaint,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement to PYMNTS.“Like a number of consumer businesses, we offer a variety of options for customers to sign up for or cancel their SiriusXM subscription and, upon receiving and reviewing the complaint, we intend to vigorously defend against these baseless allegations that grossly mischaracterize SiriusXM’s practices.”According to SiriusXM, those “mischaracterizations” include the fact that the investigation is based on findings from 2020, when the company’s customer services efforts were hindered by the effects of the COVID pandemic. By 2021, the company said, the average online chat response to consumer messages was between 36 seconds and 2.4 minutes.Meanwhile, past reporting by PYMNTS has shown that merchants who make it easy for users to cancel subscriptions can actually retain customers.Alex Brown, CEO of subscription cleaning supplies provider Truly Free, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster during a round table earlier this year that his company lets subscribers cancel services themselves directly from the membership portal.The result, he said, was “less cancellation requests, more saves and less customer service time. That’s given us the latitude to take a little bit of the pressure off of them, and I think it’s caused more of them to come back in the future too.”