Best practices to switch user from subscription to lifetime "subscription" which is consumable.

  • 7 January 2022
  • 1 reply
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Hey,
What is the best practice to switch users from existing subscription to life time product on iOS and Android, like lifetime “subscription” which is actually not a subscription but consumable product.

As I understand you cannot cancel subscription on iOS , so the only thing is to show link to the user and notify that he should cancel current subscription manually? Little bit not user friendly approach.

And for Android seems like you can revoke + refund via api, but only revoke is needed actually not a refund. Or same as iOS to show link to user for cancellation, which is also not a very good option.

Thanks


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Userlevel 5
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I’m not sure of too many examples where apps try to push a lifetime purchase to an already subscribed customer, but you’re correct the customer would need to cancel the subscription themselves on iOS. The best you could do is deeplink them to the subscription management page but it’s not ever going to be a seamless “upgrade” flow. 

The best practices I’ve seen with lifetime purchases are typically to push them to customers that have not subscribed yet, due to some aversion to recurring subscriptions.

A flow I’ve build in some of my apps has been to detect when a payment has been cancelled before completing (kind of like and abandoned cart). Then I show a system popup where the customer must select why they cancelled the payment. One of the options is always “Don’t like subscriptions” and if the customer selects that I present them with the lifetime option.

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