We charge a quarterly membership fee of 20 pounds for access to our online UK service and are currently using paypal subscriptions for this purpose.
It all works fine, we get cancellations now and then, but we get a very large number of "cancellations" on the date the renewals are supposed to occur. 30 to 50% of all subscriptions are cancelled on the renewal date. This leads me to conclude that these cancellations are not requested by the user but are due to other reasons. Expired credit card or insufficient funds would be legitimate but I wonder if there are other reasons that paypal cancel, and that another processor might be better. Does anyone have experience with both paypal and other processors - e.g worldpay's futurepay? How did the results compare with regard to cancellations?
What percentage of cancellations would it be fair to expect from these types of issues (credit card expiry etc..)? When I created the site I expected it to be far lower than the 30-50% I mentioned.
Finally, since we are based in the UK, we are considering an online direct debit solution. Does anyone have experience with these? How do cancellation rates compare - I'm obviously only really interested in cancellations not requested by the user, since those depend directly on the service provided.
At the moment the cancellation rates are so high, it hardly seems worth having subscriptions at all. Appreciate any comments!
