Your customers can self-cancel their recurring payments and subscriptions from your Customer Hub.
This is enabled by default to help vendors follow FTC guidelines on allowing their customers easy to cancel unwanted subscriptions.
Your customer hub settings can be found under your Settings > Account-wide settings > Customer hub
Above you can see the 2 options that are enabled by default, let’s clarify what these both mean;
- Subscriptions: These are your typical subscriptions, that have ongoing payments with no predetermined end date. The customer will continue paying until the subscription is cancelled.
- Split-pay & subscriptions with limited rebills: Often referred to 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.
Technically, all recurring payments are setup as a ‘subscription’ within the processor. In cases where you’re setting a max number of payment 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, allow 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.
This can help vendors protect recurring revenue in some cases.
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
Whilst 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.