Give your customers full subscription cancellation control while staying fully compliant with modern ecommerce standards.
With ThriveCart’s subscription management tools inside the customer hub, you can easily configure self-cancellation options that meet Ecommerce Compliance requirements—including click-to-cancel policies—while still maintaining a smooth experience for your buyers. Empower customers to manage their own subscriptions effortlessly, reduce support load, and keep your business aligned with today’s best practices.
Self-cancellation is enabled by default to help vendors follow FTC guidelines on allowing their customers to easily cancel unwanted subscriptions.
Additional setting control is a Pro+ feature and will need Connect+ enabled on your products in order to disable any regional or payment plan settings.
Manage Self-Cancellation Settings
There are two places where you can manage these self-cancellation features:
- Within your customer hub settings
- On a product directly
Within your Customer Hub Settings
Heading to Settings > Account-wide settings > Customer hub, you’ll see the section on self-cancellations.
Above you can see the “Allow cancellations for consumers outside of the EU” option is enabled by default. Pro+ users will be able to uncheck that box if they wish for customers outside the EU to not have cancellation options available in the customer hub.
The option to allow cancellations on limited and split-pay subscription types is disabled by default in order to help ensure that you can continue to collect on your payment plans.
However, within regulated markets such as the European Union, self-cancellation remains mandatory and so cannot be disabled entirely.
Within a product directly
On your product’s pricing tab, you’ll now see the “Customer cancellation Options” button when you have a subscription setup.
You can then opt to set product-level settings that would override the global rules set above within your customer hub settings.
Subscriptions vs. Split-pay
The settings available are for different pricing options, let’s clarify what these mean:
- Subscriptions (ongoing): These are your typical subscriptions, that have ongoing payments with no predetermined end date. The customer will continue paying until the subscription is cancelled.
- Requires Pro+ Plan to disable
- Split-pay & subscriptions (limited): Often referred to as payment plans, these types of “subscriptions” are usually used to help break the payment of a high ticket item into smaller, more manageable payments. It’s usually expected that the customer needs to complete all payments.
- Requires Pro+ Plan and Connect+ enabled on products to enable
Technically, all recurring payments are set up as a ‘subscription’ within the processor. In cases where you’re setting a max number of payments to be collected, ThriveCart will help manage that ‘subscription’ and end payments when the final payment is collected.
The flexibility with these customer hub options allows vendors to disable customer self-cancellation of those split-pay and payment plan type recurring payments. Allowing customers to only self-cancel their general ongoing subscriptions.
Limitations
PayPal
These settings only apply to customers who have paid via your Stripe or Stripe Connect+ accounts.
Customers paying via PayPal always have the option to self-cancel all recurring payment profiles/subscriptions from within their PayPal dashboard. This is a consumer protection offered by PayPal. and so if you’re offering payment plans for your product, you may consider not allowing PayPal on those checkout pages.
Failed recurring payments
While you can prevent a customer who has paid via Stripe or Stripe Connect+ from cancelling their recurring payments from your customer hub, there’s still the possibility their payments can be automatically cancelled by Stripe if payments continue to fail.
By default, Stripe will look to retry a failed subscription payment 4 times before cancelling it. So if a customer doesn’t have sufficient funds to cover their payment, and it keeps failing, their subscription could still end up being cancelled.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Q: How can a customer access the customer hub to view and manage their subscription?
- A: We have a help desk article here detailing the three methods for customer’s to access your customer hub, but those methods are:
- Via the link at the bottom of their invoice
- If you share the customer hub link with them directly (can be accessed in your customer hub settings)
- If you send a profile link to them when viewing their transaction in your ThriveCart dashboard.
- A: We have a help desk article here detailing the three methods for customer’s to access your customer hub, but those methods are:
- Q: Why can’t I disable cancellation overall?
- The EU Consumer Rights Directive and FTC (USA) are both requiring easier customer access to self-cancellations. Non-compliance with the EU Digital Services Act can lead to fines of up to 6% of annual revenue, so we’re ensuring that you’re compliant.
While the FTC rules are still moving through U.S. courts, only EU self-cancellation is currently mandatory. This could change as more regions release self-cancellation requirements.
- The EU Consumer Rights Directive and FTC (USA) are both requiring easier customer access to self-cancellations. Non-compliance with the EU Digital Services Act can lead to fines of up to 6% of annual revenue, so we’re ensuring that you’re compliant.