sticky.io: The Great Digital Shift Is Changing Online Subscriptions

COVID-19 had an immediate and dramatic impact on the state of subscription commerce. Brian Bogosian, CEO of sticky.io, recounts the initiatives his firm has embraced to help merchants overcome their challenges. “We’ve created a platform that offers flexibility in order management and billing,” he explains. “Those capabilities were in place before the pandemic, but we enhanced certain features to provide for maximum flexibility in an uncertain environment.”

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Brian Bogosian, CEO of sticky.io.

There are different ways to think about how the pandemic has changed sticky.io. The impact has been felt organizationally, inside the company (where working from home has spawned weekly virtual meetings between all employees and the CEO) and has helped reshape the product offerings for customers.

And amid the great digital shift, a subscription, in and of itself, is a commitment to a future action (payments) for future deliveries of products.

The coronavirus, of course, has raised questions about people’s ability to pay for goods and services as they navigate a rocky economic environment.

We’ve embraced a number of initiatives that ensure merchant customers see revenue increases and optimize the opportunities that exist in this challenging environment.

The pandemic has given rise to behavioral changes that are here to stay.

People seeking convenience and safety will do things online that they would have done in person before (like run to the drugstore to pick up essentials), which will lead to more people choosing subscriptions to bring items to their doorsteps in an automatic fashion.

When it comes to subscriptions, and the merchants offering them, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach. We’ve created a platform that offers flexibility in order management and billing. Those capabilities were in place before the pandemic, but we enhanced certain features to provide for maximum flexibility in an uncertain environment.

We updated Transaction Select, our managed service that helps merchants set risk acceptance parameters through the use of algorithms (which also helps battle against friendly fraud).

We have billions of transactions in our database, and we can see from a long history of purchases whether specific consumers have a predilection toward chargebacks on their subscriptions, cancellations and refund requests.

We’ve also set up a hosted member portal to help our clients handle their subscriptions, while deciding which functions they want their customers to access — such as slowing down delivery dates and frequencies. That allows merchants to be more in sync with their customers’ needs.

We built a new subscription credit process, so clients can convert monthly subscribers to annual subscriptions — which can save consumers money while giving greater assurance to merchants that they will realize, and extend, that consumer’s lifetime value.