What is a Subscription Commerce Platform?

Is it a subscription product information management tool, a subscription campaign management tool, a subscription pricing and discount management tool, a subscription promotion and voucher management tool, or a subscription offer management tool?

June 28, 2019

A Subscription Commerce Platform includes a way to organise how you sell products or services that have a recurring charge or price. It includes features such as:

Product Information Management tool
Campaign Management tool
Pricing and Discount Management tool
Promotion Management tool
Offer Management tool
Proposition Management tool

It organises which subscription products and services are being sold, to whom, its availability and price of sale.

A Subscription Commerce Platform is useful across subscription industries

Subscriptions cut across industries as diverse as telecom (broadband, mobile, pay-TV), media and entertainment (movies and TV series, magazine, newspapers, music), insurance (gadget, travel, home, health), finance (banking services, trading platforms, credit monitoring), education (MOOC, language learning), automobile (rentals), internet of things (energy, security). There is a wide range of variation in terminology and scope in subscription commerce capabilities.

Generally speaking, a subscription commerce platform will include subscriptions with flat or tiered fees. It can also include variable recurring products such as pay-as-you-go offers. A subscription commerce platform can include non-subscription products such as eCommerce products, as this allows bundling with subscription products.

A Subscription Commerce Platform must help the company to create, publish and track end-to-end the offers being sold across channels. Regardless of industries, the following capabilities should be included:

What you sell, such as a product or a service description
How you sell, such as price and messaging
Where and to whom you sell. For example, channels and segments
How well it is performing. For example, what are the acquisition and churn rates

This tool should offer capabilities to manage the end-to-end workflow of subscription campaigns and offer management. This includes everything from providing sufficient flexibility for subscription marketers to automatically create new offers in bulk for relevant segments, to managing the collaboration workflow of approving, scheduling and distributing promotion briefs, to tracking the uptake of offers by subscribers and the campaign ROI by offline and digital channels.