NEW REPORT: Building A Better Subscription Commerce Solution

Subscription services have come a long way. Once reserved for newspapers and magazines, they are now foundational to the rapidly transforming eCommerce market.

From online streaming to software products, subscription services have more recently grown to include boxes for physical goods, ranging from beauty products to snacks and alcohol.

And their popularity is anything but slowing down. Just between 2013 and 2016 alone, demand for subscription boxes is estimated to have grown by a whopping 3,000 percent, according to estimates.

As the subscription market continues to evolve, online merchants are increasingly seeing new opportunities to build stronger relationships with their customers through insights into their likes and dislikes. But for these relationships to succeed, merchants must offer online shopping experiences that enable customers to move from browse mode to buy mode with little to no friction.

To keep tabs on the friction that online subscription customers encounter, PYMNTS analyzed over 2000 data points for the inaugural issue of Subscription Commerce Conversion Index™, a Recurly collaboration. The Index highlights 54 attributes that cause friction for customers and maps 176 merchants across nine different categories to track how easy (or difficult) it is to navigate their sites to make a purchase.

Here are some key takeaways from the PYMNTS.com Subscription Commerce Conversion Index May 2017 edition:

• The average time to initiate a subscription takes 127.6 seconds
• 75 percent of the top merchants offer consumers a free trial
• Less than a third of top merchants provide product reviews and ratings

For the inaugural Index, PYMNTS sat down with Trunk Club’s CMO Linda Bartman to discuss how the clothing delivery service has evolved since its acquisition and where it sees itself in a market that is inundated with subscription services and what services and features the company employs to stay engaged with its customer base.

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About the Index

The PYMNTS.com Subscription Commerce Conversion Index ^TM, a Recurly collaboration, measures frictions that exists in the digital shopping experience for subscription services and products and how they affect the final conversion rates for a merchant. This index analyzes why certain sites are better at converting sales than others by examining several pre-payment factors that generate either friction or sales.