By Sean Clarke, Founder of Pacific IQ and EcomIQ

Earlier this year I signed up to a $250-a-month wellness subscription and nearly cancelled it inside the first month. The product itself was good. The way the subscription was run almost lost me.

The first box sat unopened for close to a month, because the default delivery schedule had nothing to do with how fast I actually got through the product. The next box was already on its way before I'd finished the first. When I tried to push that delivery back, I couldn't do it in the customer portal, so it took an email to support to sort out. On top of that, one of the starter flavours was sold as a berry, tasted nothing like one, and made up a third of the box.

None of that is a subscription problem. It's a badly built subscription problem, and it's the real reason people keep telling you the model is finished.

What's actually dying

Every so often the DTC world decides subscriptions are done. Churn is up, shoppers are tired of recurring charges, the model is over. The numbers on the ground say something else. Subscriptions still work. What's dying is the version where you switch on Subscribe & Save, pick one delivery frequency, add a small discount, and wait for repeat revenue to show up.

A subscription isn't a growth tactic you bolt onto a store. It's a promise about convenience, and it only holds up when it's built around how a customer actually uses the product. Get that right and the same customer stays with you for years. Get it wrong and they cancel, then tell everyone the model is broken.

Across the brands we work with, the pattern is consistent. The subscriptions that fail were never designed around the customer. They were turned on and left to run. As our Head of Strategy, Jennifer Courtney, puts it, repeatable revenue doesn't come from switching subscriptions on, it comes from offering them at a decision point that actually makes sense for that customer. Offer a subscription at the moment someone would naturally reorder and it feels like a favour. Push it before that moment, or on a product nobody reorders, and it feels like a trap.

Match the cadence to real usage

The fastest way to break a subscription is to send product faster than the customer can get through it. Picture a skincare product on a monthly cycle that the buyer only finishes every six weeks. Within two months they're overflowing, with nowhere to put the extra, and the subscription has become a source of waste and quiet resentment instead of convenience.

It's one of the most common mistakes in the category, and it comes from the pressure to grow recurring revenue pushing brands to default everyone onto the same aggressive cadence. The fix is to set frequency around genuine consumption. Offer the subscription at the point the customer would normally reorder, and make the default cadence match how fast the product is actually used. If you're unsure, a slightly slower cadence with an easy option to speed up beats one that buries the customer.

Friction is where a subscription is won or lost

Back to IM8. Any one of those early problems could have ended the relationship. Here's what they did instead. They answered my email fast and moved the ship date without argument. When I told them the flavour wasn't as described and not to my taste, they said keep it or give it to a friend, and shipped a replacement in the flavour I wanted, on the cadence I actually wanted. The product turned out to work, and now they have me for the long term.

This isn't really a story about supplements. It's about the fact that a subscription is a relationship, and friction is where it gets won or lost. The easy path for IM8 would have been the rigid one: you signed up for three months, it renews on this date, that's the flavour you ordered. That version loses the customer. The version built around the person rather than the contract keeps them, and keeps the lifetime value that comes with them. Convenience for the customer has to beat convenience for the finance team.

Discount or convenience: know which lever you're pulling

A discount isn't what makes a subscription work, and it isn't always necessary. The right lever depends on the category. A brand with few real competitors, where the product is hard to substitute, can run a subscription on convenience alone and skip the discount entirely. In a crowded category with plenty of alternatives, a discount is more effective at getting that first subscriber over the line, because convenience on its own isn't enough to stand out.

Where brands go wrong is treating the discount as the strategy rather than one tool inside it. Lean on a permanent subscription discount and you train customers to expect a lower price forever, and you quietly eat your own margin, the same trap brands fall into with sitewide promotions. Jennifer makes the same point about pricing: if the only reason a customer stays subscribed is the discount, you haven't built a subscription, you've built a standing discount, and sooner or later that shows up in your margin. If a discount habit is already shaping your sales calendar, the real issue usually sits deeper than pricing.

Own the relationship the subscription creates

Recurring revenue is only half of what a subscription buys you. The other half is the customer themselves, sitting in an audience you actually own, with a direct, repeatable relationship rather than one rented from a marketplace. That owned relationship is where retention and lifetime value get built, and it's worth protecting.

The way to protect it is to treat the whole lifecycle as connected. The first email a new subscriber gets sets the tone, which is why the welcome flow matters as much as the product. Timing the right offer to the right customer depends on knowing who they are and where they sit in their cycle, which is a question of segmentation. And the ship date, the cadence, and the freedom to change both are what keep the relationship alive month after month.

A few EcomIQ pieces go deeper on the surrounding parts of this: the welcome flow that sets the tone, covers the first emails a new subscriber sees, segmenting so the right offer reaches the right customer helps you time subscription offers to the moment they make sense, and if discounting is creeping into everything, your discount problem is probably a buying problem  digs into what's really driving it.

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