I've had the opportunity to develop and manage two subscription models within the vaping industry — a sector that is particularly well suited to recurring orders because products like e-liquids, pods, and coils require regular replacement. Customers who run out mid-week aren't going to wait. They need reliable replenishment, and a subscription model that delivers on that need creates a level of loyalty that transactional ecommerce almost never achieves.
What follows are the five most commercially significant things I learned from those launches — not the theory of subscriptions, but what actually happens when you build and run one in practice.
The most immediately visible benefit of a subscription model is financial — but the real impact goes beyond the revenue line itself. When you can forecast recurring orders with reasonable accuracy, the entire operational rhythm of the business changes. Inventory planning becomes more precise. Cash flow becomes more predictable. The anxiety of month-end trading peaks reduces because a meaningful portion of revenue is already committed before the month begins.
In the vaping context, knowing how many subscribers would need e-liquid replenishment in a given week allowed us to forward-buy stock at better margins, reduce waste from overstocking, and plan fulfilment capacity in advance. The financial stability of recurring revenue creates a commercial compounding effect that is significantly more valuable than the revenue number alone suggests.
Subscription customers do retain better than transactional customers. The friction of actively cancelling a subscription is real, and customers who are satisfied with the product and the experience tend to stay on a recurring order far longer than they would naturally reorder as one-off transactions.
But churn doesn't disappear — it just changes shape. The most common churn triggers we encountered weren't customer dissatisfaction with the product. They were passive churn: payment failures that weren't followed up quickly enough, customers who had forgotten they were subscribed and cancelled on sight of the charge, and customers whose needs changed (different products, different frequency) but who had no easy way to modify rather than cancel.
Active churn management — fast payment failure recovery, easy pause and modify options, and a proactive win-back programme — can recover a meaningful percentage of churned subscribers if the infrastructure is in place.
When we spoke to subscribers about why they had signed up, the answers were remarkably consistent: they didn't want to think about reordering. They wanted to know that their products would arrive without them having to remember to act. Convenience, in a market built around regular product consumption, is not a nice-to-have. It is the primary value proposition.
This has significant implications for how you design and communicate the subscription. The messaging should lead with the removal of friction — "never run out," "automatic delivery," "no need to remember" — rather than with discount or savings language. Price incentives attract price-sensitive customers who will churn when a competitor offers a better deal. Convenience attracts customers who value reliability, and those customers stay.
One of the underappreciated benefits of a functioning subscription model is the demand visibility it creates. Knowing how many units of a product will be dispatched in a given week — weeks in advance — transforms inventory management from reactive guesswork into structured planning.
In practice, this meant we could negotiate better forward-buying terms with suppliers, reduce the frequency of emergency restocks (which always come at a premium), and avoid the damaging customer experience of sending a substitution because a subscribed product was out of stock. Stockouts in a subscription model are disproportionately damaging — a customer who receives a substitution they didn't ask for is a cancellation risk in a way that a one-off transaction customer usually isn't.
A subscriber is, by definition, a customer who has committed to an ongoing relationship with the business. That commitment creates a commercial opportunity that transactional customers simply don't offer: the ability to introduce new products, curate personalised recommendations, and build basket size gradually within a trusted relationship.
The key is doing this with restraint and genuine relevance. The worst thing you can do with a subscriber is treat them as a captive audience for aggressive upselling. The best thing you can do is introduce them to one complementary product at a time, based on what they already buy, framed around their convenience rather than your revenue targets. Done well, this increases average order value for subscribers significantly above the transactional average — and does so without any of the acquisition cost that drove the initial conversion.
Is a Subscription Model Right for Your Business?
Subscription models work best when three conditions are met: customers buy the same or similar products regularly, the products are consumed or depleted over a predictable period, and the switching cost of changing supplier is relatively low. When those conditions exist, a subscription model doesn't just generate recurring revenue — it changes the competitive dynamics of the market.
- Predictable revenue changes the whole operational rhythm — model it separately from transactional revenue to see what it's really worth
- Churn management needs to be built before launch — payment failure recovery alone can retain 15–20% of lapsing subscribers
- Convenience is the product — lead your messaging with friction removal, not discount. Price buyers churn. Convenience buyers stay.
- Protect subscriber inventory — stockouts in a subscription model cause disproportionate damage to the customer relationship
- The pre-dispatch email is your best upsell moment — high intent, high open rate, low friction to add one item to an upcoming order