The challenges of making Subscription Models happen

You know you want subscriptions in your business, and you’re ready to make it happen. Just to give you the heads-up, there are going to be some challenges to making it happen. But because we’ve put together this handy piece, you’ll be ready if they spring up.

There are two broad categories that the challenges of making subscription models happen fall into. Those are perception challenges and technical challenges. That’s really true of any project that has a digital element that you want to implement. Let’s dig a little deeper and see what specific challenges fit into each category.

Perception Challenges The vision your business has is going to play a big part in how successful adopting a subscription model is going to be. Can the leaders of your business see a future with subscriptions as a part of what you offer? If they can, that’s great; but if they can't, it’s going to be a difficult sell and even harder in terms of day-to-day adoption.

Further to that point, if your business has a skeptical culture and is naturally worried about threats to your products or services, is the suggestion of a subscription model going to cause panic? No business wants to feel as if it is losing control over the ownership of its offering, so a subscription service might be seen as a step too far.

Beyond the general business concerns, not every product or service is suitable for a subscription model. It takes real foresight to be able to judge if an existing product or service can be adapted or augmented with subscriptions. If you can’t get this vision across to decision-makers in a business, it’s going to be difficult to get the project off the ground.

For example, our work with DAF trucks perfectly highlighted what real vision looks like. Many truck companies might have looked at their one-off product sales and thought, “how could a subscription work here?”. But DAF saw the type of value they could add to one-off purchases with subscriptions and has now gone on to develop an extensive B2B subscription ecosystem.

Technical Challenges Once you have adapted to the subscription vision and company culture, the technical implementation will be the next challenge in front of you if you want to make subscriptions happen in your business. Most commonly what we see is a misunderstanding or underestimation of the required architecture that is needed to get started. Creating a subscription platform with the correct technical architecture requires a rethink of the Business Layer in your tech stack.

The second variable is the integrations needed to establish a subscription model. They go further and deeper than your average commerce setup with an ERP, PIM, and CRM. What we see in almost all cases is that the internal product & data systems are heavily relied upon. Simply put, combining data sets throughout your business and tying them into a subscription model is itself a challenge. 

Lastly, enabling your customer (whether that is B2C or B2B) to interact with the subscription (variables) they signed up for, requires a much richer experience than a standard commerce checkout. Your front end will also definitely need a revamp. 

Assuming you have the skill in-house, then the chances are that your talent is already busy working on your IT roadmap which probably doesn’t have any open slots for a good couple of years. The best thing you can do if you think these challenges do lay in store for your business's subscription aspirations is to reach out to an expert. An expert, like rb2, can help guide you through business buy-in, along with all the technical expertise and capacity you could ever need to make subscription services a reality in your business.