How to ensure the Cancellation Prevention flow complies with regional laws

This guide explains how to ensure your Cancellation Prevention flow aligns with local laws while maintaining transparency and reducing churn.

Introduction

When creating a cancellation prevention flow, it’s important to balance retention with compliance. Many regions have laws requiring clear, easy-to-follow cancellation options for subscriptions. These rules protect consumers and help you avoid fines, chargebacks, or damaged trust.

Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention flows let you design different customer experiences based on their location, using conditional branches. You can customize the flow to meet local requirements and exclude customers from certain cancellation prevention experiences.

For instance, you might use a conditional branch to present North American customers with an incentive to stay subscribed, while letting European customers cancel without seeing an offer.

Prerequisites

• You must use a Cancellation Prevention flow to follow this guide.

Things to consider

Make sure to research and consult with a professional to confirm your cancellation prevention strategies comply with local regulations. You can do this by reviewing regional consumer protection laws and consulting with a legal or compliance expert familiar with subscription-based businesses.

Setup instructions

This guide provides setup instructions for creating a basic cancellation prevention flow with suggested offers.

Step 1 – Create the cancellation experience

1. Select Cancellation Prevention under the Churn tools menu item in the Recharge merchant portal.
2. Click Create from template and choose Basic cancellation experience with suggested offers.
3. Click Get started.

Step 2 – Add the conditional branch

Conditional branches let you offer customers different cancellation-prevention experiences based on predefined conditions.

1. Open the node menu on the left-hand side of the flow canvas.
2. Select the Conditional branch node from the Conditions tab and drag it onto the flow canvas. 
3. Click the node to edit your branches.
4. Select the pencil next to Branch 1 to open the editor.
5. Choose Shipping address as the object. Select one of the following attributes to create location-based conditions:
   • Country: The customer’s country, as determined by their shipping address. Use this to apply conditions for customers in specific countries or to differentiate between international regions.
   • Zip code: The customer’s postal or ZIP code, based on their shipping address. Use this to create highly targeted conditions for customers in specific cities, neighborhoods, or delivery zones.
   • State/Province: The customer’s state or province, as indicated by their shipping address. Use this to apply conditions for customers in specific regions within a country.
6. Select either the equals or does not equal operator and enter the state, country, or zip code to create the location-specific condition.
7. Optional: Use the or selector to add additional locations as conditions.
8. Click Apply to save your condition.

Optional – Create multiple conditional branches

1. Click the Conditional branch node.
2. Select Add branch to create additional conditional branches.

Step 3 – Review the cancellation survey nodes

Recharge assigns a cancellation survey node to each branch, with default cancellation survey answers that you can edit, and add offers to prevent customers from churning. See offer types for more information.

1. Click the Cancellation survey node for each branch to review the available survey answers and offers.
2. Click the trash can next to a survey answer to delete it, or click the pencil icon to make changes.
3. You must have at least one cancellation reason present on the cancellation survey node. Recharge recommends using the Other option if you don’t want to collect survey data or offer an incentive.
4. Click Apply to save your changes.

This ensures customers in regions with strict cancellation laws see a compliant flow while still allowing incentives elsewhere.

Step 4 – Design the onsite experience for customers

Customers are directed to a specific page when they attempt to cancel their subscription, where they can view the cancellation survey answers and any available incentives. After a customer cancels, the cancellation confirmation page may also display a bold message showing how many other active subscriptions they still have, when that number is one or more.

1. Select Customize landing page on the cancellation survey node to navigate to the Site Builder.
2. Edit the onsite experience using the Site Builder to control the appearance of your offer page and customize content to match your brand.

Step 5 – Save and activate the flow

Save and activate the flow after confirming everything is configured correctly:

1. Click Save.
2. Click Activate when ready to go live with your flow.
3. Select Confirm: activate flow.
4. Run through the cancellation steps in your customer portal to test the flow.

What’s next

You’ve built a compliant, location-aware cancellation prevention flow. Next, you can:

• Create Win Back campaigns for customers who still choose to cancel.
• Analyze flow performance in your analytics dashboard.
• Add A/B testing to experiment with different incentives

Keep refining your flows to increase retention while maintaining a transparent cancellation experience for all customers.