Subscription churn rate:
where subscribers leave.
The subscription churn rate, measured order by order: we followed subscribers from their first order to their seventh in the stores we run and audit, and read every cancellation their subscription apps logged in the last twelve months: when they left, why, and how many were saved.
Share of new subscribers who placed each order at the typical store, first order to seventh.
Subscription churn rate, in short.
never place a second order at the typical store.
of those who renew once never renew again, so the second renewal costs as much as the first.
of cancellations come before the first renewal charge, and 3% on the day the subscription starts.
cancel because they have too much product, ahead of price at 19%.
are saved by the cancel flow, and 43% of failed payments come back in the first round of retries.
Subscription churn rate by order, half gone by the third.
At the typical store 72% of new subscribers place a second order, 52% a third, 38% a fourth and 27% a fifth. Across stores the second order ranges from 54% to 89%.
Typical store (median). Subscribers whose first order was a subscription, started May to October 2025, followed to October 2026.
The newest subscribers behave the same way: 71% of those who started between November 2025 and April 2026 have already placed a second order.
Every renewal costs a quarter to a third.
The first renewal is not the only cliff. Of those who place a second order, 31% never place a third; then 28% are lost before the fourth, 27% before the fifth and 23% before the sixth.
Typical store (median): of the subscribers who reached each order, the share who never placed the next.
A plan that only works on the first renewal leaves most of the loss in place.
When they cancel, four in ten go before the first charge.
At the typical store 38% of cancellations land before the first renewal charge, and 3% on the same day the subscription started. Across stores the first share runs from 9% to 60%. The days between the first order and the first renewal hold more of the loss than any later stretch.
Typical store (median), as each subscription app logs them, November 2025 to October 2026.
Why they leave, too much product, then price.
Among subscribers who give a real reason, the most common is having too much product left (24%), then the price (19%) and no longer needing it (18%). Not seeing results is 9%, and 7% say they never meant to subscribe.
Typical store (median share of cancellations that gave a real reason; “other” and blank answers left out), November 2025 to October 2026.
Too much product is a delivery problem before it is a loyalty problem: a skip, a longer interval or a smaller pack answers it without a discount. How the offer sets that up is on our subscription offer page.
Saves and failed payments.
of subscribers who enter the cancel flow are saved, from 7% to 29% across stores.
of cancellations are failed payments where the app separates them from the ones a subscriber asked for.
of failed payments come back in the first round of retries.
What to do about each of these moments, from the offer to the cancel flow to payment recovery, is our subscription churn strategy.
How we measured.
This study uses the stores YOCTO runs and audits. Every figure is anonymous and pooled; no store can be told apart from another.
Two sources
The stores’ own Shopify order data, the same for every subscription app, and the subscription apps themselves (Loop, Recharge and Skio), read for November 2025 to October 2026.
Who is a subscriber
A customer whose first order ever contained a subscription. We follow those who started between May and October 2025 to the end of October 2026, so everyone had at least a year to come back.
Reaching an order
Shopify sees orders, not cancellations: a subscriber who cancelled, paused for good or whose card kept failing all look the same to it. So “reached the third order” means placed a third order; almost all of those later orders are renewals.
When and why
Read from the subscription apps over November 2025 to October 2026. Each app counts differently, so we compare shares store by store and report the typical store: the median.
Limits
Stores that moved to a new subscription app during the year are counted from the move. Reasons are what the subscriber picked in the cancel flow; “other” and blank answers are left out of the reason shares.
Cite this research.
Free to cite with attribution to YOCTO, under a CC BY 4.0 license. More benchmarks are on our subscription ecommerce statistics. Next refresh: February 2027.
Kapernaros, G. (2026). Subscription Churn Benchmarks 2026: Where Subscribers Leave and Why. YOCTO. https://yocto.agency/subscription-churn-benchmarks/
See where your
subscribers leave.
We read your subscription app and your orders against these benchmarks and show which renewal costs you the most. Then we fix that one first.
