77% of Top-Performing Subscription Merchants Offer Features Known to Inspire Consumer Trust 

There is increasing pressure on retail subscription merchants to improve their customers’ overall subscription experiences in order to stand out and meet their higher-than-ever expectations. 

Subscription merchants have been continuously improving their user experiences since Q1 2021, adding more subscription and checkout features to their sites each quarter, according to the Subscription Commerce Conversion Index, a PYMNTS and sticky.io collaboration that surveyed 2,424 consumers. 

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For example, the share of merchants offering guarantee or refund policies, pause features and buy buttons all have increased for the fourth consecutive quarter. In fact, the share offering buy buttons has leapt from 8% in Q1 2021 to 26% in Q4 2021. 

Merchants’ offerings of subscription and checkout features may be improving on the industry level, but many merchants are still struggling to keep up with the rest of the pack. The 30 merchants with the lowest Index scores lack many of the subscription features those would-be subscribers have come to expect from merchants. 

These bottom performers trail especially far behind the rest in one area: providing features that are known to inspire consumer comfort and trust. These features include guarantee or refund policies and password security restrictions, which set parameters for which characters might be included in the passwords that subscribers use to secure their accounts. 

Consumers tend to trust merchants that offer both features more than those that do not, yet only 20% of bottom performers offer guarantee or refund policies and only 10% use password security restrictions. Among top performers, 83% have guarantee or refund policies and 77% use password security restrictions. 

These comfort and trust features represent not only key areas of improvement that both bottom and middle providers could consider to boost their conversion potential going forward, but also potential problems that could hurt long-term growth if left unaddressed.