Every subscription brand loses 30 to 50 percent of cancellations they could have saved with a working pause flow. This SOP defines exactly what your team does when a customer requests a pause: which durations to offer, when to offer discounts, when to escalate, and how to follow up. Loose pause handling is one of the highest-ROI fixes in subscription DTC.
Subscription DTC brands using Recharge, Skio, or Bold. Most acute for brands with 30-day shipment cadences where pause requests come in monthly.
Pause is the gateway to retention. A customer who pauses for 2 months stays a customer. A customer who can't pause cancels and rarely returns. Pause conversion rate is one of the most controllable metrics in subscription DTC.
Subscription pause requests come with low patience. Speed matters more than thoroughness on the first response.
Check Recharge for active status, next charge date, and pause history. Customers who have paused 3+ times are higher cancel risk.
Default to 2 months. Three months max for consumables. Anything above 3 months and you're losing the customer.
Process the pause through Recharge, not by canceling and restarting later. Cancellation breaks attribution and discounts.
Confirm pause start date, resume date, and how to extend. Include a link to manage subscription. Customers who get clear confirmation don't churn later.
Tag with pause-1 (first pause), pause-2, etc. Use the tag for win-back segments.
Klaviyo flow triggered 5 days before resume. This email is the moment of churn-vs-retain. Make it good. Include product highlight or new arrival.
Customers who resume after pause are 2x more likely to refer. Tag them for VIP follow-up.
Exit survey with 3 options: too much product, financial, product issues. The data shapes your pause strategy.
Record your screen while running this procedure. ReccordSOP captures every step with screenshots, then alerts you when the actual process drifts from documentation.
Try ReccordSOP freeTwo months. Long enough for the customer to actually use existing product. Short enough that they re-engage before forgetting the brand.
No, not on pause itself. Save discounts for the cancel intent step after pause is rejected. Discounting pause trains discount-shopping behavior.
40 percent of cancel intents converting to pause is excellent. Below 20 percent and your pause UX needs work, usually the issue is friction in finding the pause option.
I built ReccordSOP after watching too many DTC ops teams lose months to undocumented workflows. These SOPs are battle-tested with Shopify operators running $1M to $50M brands.
Last reviewed June 1, 2026