Subscription eCommerce Solutions on B2B Platforms

With enterprise eCommerce, subscriptions are very powerful. Subscriptions can massively change a business if they don't currently offer subscriptions, or and many of those that do aren’t taking full advantage of what subscriptions can do for their company’s bottom line.  

Whether they're setting up subscriptions for the first time or they already have subscriptions, there are many things that leveraging an eCommerce platform like Clarity eCommerce can enable. One of the big benefits that we can offer is to enable complete integration, automating the process of fulfillment and managing. Our B2B platforms as a whole can even offer options such as revenue needs and inventory projection. Let’s see how subscriptions can be a huge part of your eCommerce business model. 

Managing the pipeline of subscription items and keeping the renewal rate very high is obviously vital to making subscriptions a profitable product on your B2B platform. You can’t just count on customers to stay subscribed to a service or product just because they signed up once. It’s important that you spend time making customer contact as specialized as possible to make renewal messaging associated with subscriptions as convincing as you can. 

Automated renewals need to have notifications ready to go whenever a customer’s credit card is expiring. This is done using technology like account update, so whenever the card on file is expired, Clarity’s software can actually automatically update the card even if the expiration date has changed. This can also be very helpful to ensure that these subscriptions keep renewing and everything runs smoothly. 

Offer Upgrades

Typically, Clarity’s subscription eCommerce software will show subscriptions in the user dashboard where customers are able to manage their subscriptions. Once a user is at their subscription screen, they can see a number of different interfaces. In many cases, the subscriptions that a user has purchased might be a membership of some kind or they might be some level of access, and so the software should visually show how much time is left in the membership and what the options are to renew or upgrade. 

It's very helpful to show upgrade options in the user dashboard that are subtle — but clear — so the user can see, “Hey, if I upgrade to this now, I save 27% off of the typical price, and I've been wanting to upgrade to this because I've been getting an email every single month telling me about all the features that I would gain.” 

Some of the clients we provide eCommerce subscription software to have physical goods that they regularly ship out to their customers. For example, one of our previous accounts that use subscriptions for physical items has a certain time period before they had to be replaced. Such items are often used on an assembly line that are eventually going to need to be replenished. These are things that can be set up as auto-purchase and then replenished in this subscription type of model. 

Offer Customers Deals

Discounts are a part of nearly every eCommerce business model, and it’s no different for subscription-based eCommerce. Customers don't have to make the cash commitment upfront, but they can make a commitment that can be legally binding, then get the discount for purchasing for a year without having to pay for a year upfront. So the subscription at the upgrades can be very helpful to make the cost of getting volume discounts or quantity-based discounts be more of an operational expense instead of a capital expense. 

This is something that many subscription eCommerce businesses are constantly working to do, to enable a subscription dashboard that lets them do that. So it's not just memberships and other access to digital items, but it's also very much a capability for enabling automated purchases, scheduled purchases, and recurring purchases that they need to complete within their enterprise eCommerce experience.

Accommodating Customer Subscription Needs

One of the problems of recurring purchases is that it's possible that the timing can be off, and the user may find that the items are coming too often or not often enough. In contrast, they may need a temporary increase in the items they use. Clarity's eCommerce framework and software can present them a weekly or monthly order, then give them a window when they can add additional items or increase the quantity of certain items (and, if you choose, keep the same shipping cost). Physically, this could manifest itself in the form of an LTL package that's going to the client once a week where there's room for adding additional items to the pallet. 

Clarity’s eCommerce subscription software can also allow a customer to temporarily pause the subscription, and we can auto-resume after a certain period. A message can be sent to the effect of, “If you pause, here's what you’ll lose out on. Please confirm here.” For some of the membership options, this may pause their membership access to digital goods. 

When they pause their membership, they are still allowed to sign in, but they're going to see that they don't have access due to the pause. A button can take them to the subscription pane within the user dashboard, where they can unpause their subscription. In the subscription area, it can also be set up where they can pause with the understanding that there will be an “auto-unpause” after a certain amount of time. 

Another big piece of subscriptions is presenting the user a visual of how things are going with their subscription reminders. Many times someone might subscribe but not remember everything that comes with their subscription. 

Whenever they go to their user dashboard on your B2B eCommerce software, it can be a good idea to remind them of what their benefits are, then provide them with direct access to those benefits. These reminders could be links to information, such as video snippets about each membership benefit to reengage the member. The benefits of upgrading to another plan can also be touted by showing some of these for the other plans that are available that they may not have access to yet. 

The subscription user dashboard can also let the user add additional subscriptions, recurring purchases, etc. They can also manage the existing subscription so they can change the membership that they have. With physical goods, they might change the items but keep the same recurring purchase. Maybe it's just an attribute of an item, something as simple as color.  

Other times it can be seasonally based. A manufacturing line might change the viscosity of a fluid that they're ordering based on the temperature in the warehouse that fluctuates throughout the year. Someone who maintains swimming pools might have an auto-purchase of chlorine, where the level changes based on the temperature and the weather. 

Customer Account Changes

Subscription eCommerce software most often uses credit card APIs on the B2B platform to process credits cards, but it can also use other forms of payment like e-checks, bank accounts, or ACH accounts so the customer can use their account credit to purchase orders. The software can also issue detailed invoices that show up in the user's dashboard for every subscription purchase and then group those so they can see the monthly payments that are going through and allow the customer to import those into their internal system for back-office management. 

Many times subscriptions are pretty simple, but the point is that as the business grows, Clarity wants to make sure that the end-user has all of the capabilities that they would expect to make things self-service. They need to manage their payment information, billing information, what's getting shipped to them, how often, and make one-off changes for this subscription cycle. 

Then the software needs to be able to present to the user-intelligent information based on the products. So if there are different products purchased — maybe one is membership and one is a recurring physical item purchase — we want to be able to show different upgrade options and different membership benefits to the user based on the product type and the subscription type.  

With regards to memberships, you’ll want to have a workflow in place for whenever someone wants to cancel. Typically, cancellation is set up so that it requires a phone call. This will provide an opportunity for the internal team to try to re-establish the value of the subscription. It can also be helpful to clear up any confusion the subscriber has regarding the subscription. 

It's also helpful to have screens in the UI of the B2B eCommerce platform that offers benefits to continuing with the membership or with a recurring purchase; an excellent time to remind the user what those benefits are. The software can also offer them discounts for continuing, but you have to be careful because this can seem a little gimmicky and weaken the justification for your original pricing. But if a business wants to ensure that the user continues to have recurring orders going through, the software can provide them with a small discount that's available.  

Some customers may have made a commitment to actually complete a certain number of purchases or continue the subscription for a certain amount of time. The purchases may have been the basis for them hitting a discount, so you could present them with options to buy out the remaining subscription. If they are canceling for a particular reason that's covered under that agreement — maybe they didn't get the items on time — that might justify them requesting cancellation. 

Interactions to Save Subscriptions

In a similar fashion to phone interactions and onscreen interactions, the subscription software on the eCommerce framework can also enable chat either via an external tool or our internal chat that's part of the eCommerce platform. This enables your team to interact with the customer directly. This can be very helpful to make sure that the customer has what they need. If they have a complex recurring purchase or need to set up or a membership that they're thinking about canceling, then having a chat tool can be the first line of defense to get that interaction going. Online calls and screen shares can also be implemented. 

While you probably don’t want to have to interact with every single customer who threatens to cancel, the methods mentioned above can provide hands-on support to give your team the full opportunity to prevent cancellations. 

Subscription eCommerce with Clarity

We encourage you to think about what your exact subscription workflow is right now, then consider how it can be better with dedicated eCommerce subscription software. If you need to enable subscriptions for memberships, recurring orders, or both, then consider how Clarity can make that workflow even better. 

Clarity can help. We’ve created and specialized dozens of subscription services for our clients during B2B eCommerce development, and we’re ready to help you. Click below to get a quote or schedule a demo.