Getting started with Cancellation Prevention flows

Note: Recharge is rolling out a new merchant portal experience. You may notice that some articles still reflect the old navigation. We are in the process of updating our guides to reflect these changes.

Relevant to:

Preventing customer churn is one of the biggest challenges for subscription businesses. Cancellation Prevention helps you win back customers at the moment they attempt to cancel by offering targeted incentives and gathering valuable insights into why they are leaving.

This guide provides an overview of the Cancellation Prevention template, including recovery strategies, configuration instructions, and analytical information to gain insight into the flow's performance.

Platform:

Shopify Checkout Integration
Migrated Shopify Checkout Integration

Cancellation prevention overview

Cancellation Prevention turns cancellation requests into retention opportunities. With automated flows, you can:

Understand why customers are cancelling through surveys and insights
Provide tailored offers such as discounts, product swaps, or order delays
Run A/B tests to find the most effective incentives
Prevent “gaming” behavior by limiting repeat use of offers
Track performance with detailed analytics

Key features

Gaming prevention

Gaming prevention sets invisible time limits (default 365 days) on monetary offers. Customers who try to claim again are redirected to a fallback option like “skip next order.” This ensures fairness while maintaining sustainable incentives.

A/B test flows

Add the A/B test node to send customers down two paths with different incentives. Review analytics to see which performs better, and fine-tune future flows with confidence.

Cancellation reason insights

Recharge provides up to five AI-generated insights by cancellation reason or by the product on the Cancellation prevention Insights page if you have over 50 unique cancellation reason notes in the past month. These AI-generated insights help you understand why customers cancel so that you can understand your business at a higher level and make impactful business decisions to reduce customer churn.

Navigate to your insights by clicking the Insights tab from the Cancellation Prevention Overview page. Use the filter to view insights for a specific product or reason, and analyze in detail why customers cancel.

Review your cancellation insights to refine your Cancellation Prevention flows. For example, you could:

Iterate on your product offerings: Review customer concerns and cancellation reasons and determine if you need to change the product price or subscription frequency to align with the market and customer expectations.
Identify high-impact best offers: Use insights to identify key customer complaints and create offers that address these issues.

Cancellation Prevention standalone landing page

All standard portal themes now redirect customers to a standalone landing page where they select a cancellation reason and see tailored retention offers.

The offer survey displays when a customer selects a cancellation reason.

In-app modal

Note: Only legacy implementations use the in-app modal.

A churn survey modal displays in the Affinity customer portal theme, allowing customers to select their reason for canceling and possibly choose their incentive to be retained.

The offer specific to the survey answer appears when a customer selects a cancellation reason.

Use cases

Here are common cancellation challenges and how merchants use Cancellation Prevention to solve them:

Challenge	Cancellation Prevention solution
Customers have too much inventory of the same product	Let customers delay their next order instead of cancelling.
Price concerns	Offer a targeted discount on the next order, or future orders.
Product dissatisfaction	Provide an easy swap option for a different product.
High-value customer at risk	Use tags like “VIP” or “loyal-customer” to identify valuable subscribers and give them a more generous retention offer.
Customers cancel specific products that drive high LTV	Use a collection-based condition to detect when customers attempt to cancel these key products. You can route them into a tailored retention path that offers a stronger incentive, such as a targeted discount, or a curated product swap, while directing all other cancellations to a standard experience.

Set-up instructions

See How to build a Cancellation Prevention flow for set-up instructions.

Considerations

Consider the following when building Cancellation Prevention flows:

Consideration	Notes
Optional survey answers	Recharge appreciates your commitment to compliance and wants to assure you that Recharge's features are capable of supporting the varied compliance needs of all merchants worldwide. Recharge features are designed to provide flexibility in your merchant portal and set you up for success with your unique compliance efforts. Recharge offers numerous customization options for cancellation flows, which you can learn more about in Cancellation Flows - Options and Regulatory Considerations. While Recharge's product is designed to facilitate your compliance, Recharge cannot offer legal advice regarding how you customize or use the product. It is ultimately your responsibility to determine how to comply with applicable laws and regulations. If you have any questions about our features, Recharge is happy to clarify available options. Please don’t hesitate to reach out, Recharge is here to support you.
Discounts	Discounts from Cancellation Prevention flows applied to orders are stacked with discounts from Rewards flows, plus subscribe and save discounts and Tiered Discounts.
Discount offers	Discount offers (not discount codes) are removed if the customer updates their next charge date.
Prepaid subscriptions	Cancellation reasons with swap and skip offers will not be displayed to customers trying to cancel a prepaid subscription. Prepaid subscriptions are incompatible with swaps. Configuring a cancellation reason with a swap offer causes the swap to fail.
Customer portal	Cancellation Prevention is compatible with all customer portal themes. See Customer experience for information on the differences per theme. If your store is using Theme Engine, additional customizations are required. If you have a custom customer portal you can use the SDK to get a link that redirects customers to a cancellation prevention landing page, however, you cannot make any changes beyond what the site builder offers, meaning you cannot fully customize the survey experience. The Customer cannot use discount codes setting in the customer portal does not apply to reactivation discount codes. These discounts are automatically applied through the flow and are not entered manually by the customer.
Translations	You can translate your Cancellation Prevention strategy into a different language to match your brand. See How to translate your Cancellation Prevention strategy for more information.
Bundles	When you use a swap offer in Cancellation Prevention, customers can’t swap the contents of a bundle. They can only swap the entire bundle for another product. At this time, the ability to modify or customize bundle contents during a swap isn’t supported.
Product-specific cancellation flows	If you use a conditional branch to filter by product and show specific surveys, use the Subscription being cancelled condition to make sure customers go down the correct path. Avoid using the Line item condition as it checks the next queued order, not the one the customer is cancelling, which can lead to the wrong survey appearing. See Cancellation Prevention conditional branch not working for specific product cancellation for more information.
Cancellation Prevention Insights timing	Cancellation Prevention Insights only display data from the previous calendar month. If you recently activated your flow, insights may appear empty until the start of the next month, even if customers have already submitted cancellation reasons.

Resources

See the following resources below for additional information:

How-to guides

FAQ

Cancellation Prevention FAQ

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Cancellation prevention overview