The hardest thing about running a shop is that every month starts at zero. Whatever you sold in March counts for nothing on the first of April. You are winning the same customers again, or new ones, from a standing start, forever.
Subscriptions answer that. Not because recurring revenue is a fashionable phrase, but because knowing who will buy again next month changes what you can plan, what stock you can commit to, and how much of your week goes on chasing sales you already made once.
The catch has always been that subscriptions are fiddly to run: cards expire, people want to pause, someone needs a different quantity this month. Which is why it needs to be part of the platform rather than something you improvise.
How often a plan repeats
Five cadences: weekly, monthly, quarterly, every six months, and annually. You can offer one per plan or several side by side, which matters more than it sounds.
A class pass might be weekly for regulars and monthly for everyone else. A pattern library might be monthly, with an annual plan for its keenest members. Both live in the same catalogue rather than needing two systems.
You can update plans without disrupting people already subscribed, which is the thing you will need on day 200 when your costs have moved.
Pausing, which is the feature that saves subscriptions
The instinct is to make cancelling hard. It is the wrong instinct, and it produces angry reviews.
The better answer is making pausing easy. Someone going away for a month, or too busy to make use of it for a while, does not want to cancel. They want to stop for a bit. If the only button available says cancel, they will press cancel, and you will have lost them permanently over a temporary problem.
Orbit lets you pause any subscription from your dashboard, and customers can pause and resume their own from their account.
Every subscriber in one list
Every subscription is visible in one place: status, current period, customer details and an activity timeline of every change, without exporting anything.
The numbers to watch
Orbit puts active subscriptions, new subscriptions and the churn rate above your subscriber list, so none of them needs a spreadsheet. Churn, the proportion leaving each month, is the one most people avoid looking at, and small differences in it compound brutally.
Watch churn hardest. Adding subscribers to a leaky subscription is expensive and demoralising, and no amount of marketing outruns a retention problem.
What people actually sell this way
Memberships. A workshop's tool club, a supporters' club, early access to new releases. Often the highest margin thing a small brand can sell, because the marginal cost is near zero.
Services on a rhythm. A weekly class, a monthly clean, a quarterly bike service. The customer picks the plan that fits their diary, and pausing covers the weeks they are away.
Digital access. Online lessons, a recipe club, a pattern library. The value grows every time you add to it, and so does the reason to stay.
Setting up your first plan
- Pick one product people already rebuy. Look at your repeat orders. The answer is usually already in your data.
- Choose one cadence to start. Monthly, almost certainly. Add others once you know it works.
- Subscribe yourself before you promote it.
Good to know
Start where people already come back. A subscription turns demand you already have into a habit, so start with the thing people already buy again. If hardly anyone returns for anything today, fix that first.
You are making a promise about the future. Every cycle you now have to deliver, in a month when you might be ill, moving premises or short of stock. That is an operational commitment, and it is the part people underestimate.
Questions people ask about subscriptions
Which schedules can a subscription plan run on?
Five: weekly, monthly, quarterly, every six months, and annually. You can offer a single cadence per plan or run several side by side, so a weekly plan for heavy users and a monthly plan for everyone else can sit in the same catalogue.
Can customers pause a subscription instead of cancelling?
Yes, and you should encourage it. Customers can pause and resume from their own account, and you can pause any subscription from the dashboard. Making pausing easy is one of the most effective retention tools there is, because most people cancelling would rather have stopped temporarily.
The short version
Start with one product people already rebuy, one cadence, and an honest price. Make pausing easy. Watch churn harder than you watch sign-ups. And remember you have promised to deliver this every month from now on, which is the real commitment, not the software.
What this saves you buying
On most platforms the things above arrive as separate paid apps. On Orbit they are part of the plan.
| What you would otherwise buy | The cost elsewhere |
|---|---|
| A subscriptions app | a monthly bill, sometimes with a share of your subscription sales on top |