Enabling Rent-to-own with Subscription Milestones

As an alternative to selling high-priced perpetual licenses up-front, more and more merchants are now offering Rent-to-own schemes in order to let customers get an extended taste of the product, while still working towards ownership. This technique has garnered massive amounts of positive customer reviews, leading to more sales and greater flexibility for consumers across the board.

These Rent-to-own schemes come in many shapes and sizes; focusing on single high-ticket products, but also on bigger collections of products. Yum Audio runs their Rent-to-own programme as part of their "YumPass" all-access subscription, where every 12 months of being subscribed, customers receive a $150 coupon they can spend to get their favourite plugins for free.

When we started building support for this in Moonbase, we wanted to support either approach, to make sure our merchants has the tools to sell their products the way they want. The result is what we call Subscription Milestones.

Introducing Subscription Milestones

Crafting your own rent-to-own scheme or just a generic rewards programme for subscriptions is now easier than ever, just head over to the new "Milestones" section of your subscription price variation:

These milestones are defined per price variation, which means you can have different schemes for different types of subscriptions, whether yearly or monthly, cheap or expensive. Each scheme may have multiple milestones, meaning you can drip-feed rewards throughout the journey. Today, we support the following two reward types:

1. Coupon codes: Simply define a coupon on your account, with any restrictions (for example a limit on redemptions per code), and we'll automatically generate a unique code for the customer, and communicate the code by email.
2. Perpetual license conversion: This will remove any expiry date on subscription licenses, making them perpetual and independent of the subscription.

With these, you can already craft a myriad of reward schemes to keep customers invested in your subscriptions, with the options to also repeat the scheme for as long as the subscription is active, or automatically stop subscriptions on reaching the end of the scheme.

Customer experience

On the customer side of things, we've extended both our APIs and SDKs to be able to render progress and upcoming rewards, and added UI for this in the Embedded Storefront:

Customers will be able to see all previous rewards, including the generated coupon codes, as well as a preview of upcoming ones on any subscriptions they may have.

Tips & Tricks

These milestones are set up to be flexible, to cater for a wide variety of reward schemes, but here's some tips and tricks you may want to consider.

Coupon setup

When setting up coupons for use in milestone rewards, we often intend for them to be personal codes, unique for the customer earning the reward. To make sure this is the case, you should add a redemption limit per code of 1 in the coupon configuration:

This makes each code generated actually unique, usable once only.

Consider future upgrades

Subscriptions in Moonbase are never automatically updated when you update the product or bundle they are subscribing to, they keep their price, content and any milestone scheme they were created with when first started by customers.

Especially for bundle subscriptions, it's common that you change price and bundle content over time, at which point you usually want to upgrade subscriptions. Upgrading subscriptions will align the price and/or content to match the current price and content of the product or bundle, communicating the change to customers and potentially revoking or issuing licenses.

Since these subscription milestones are part of the price, you need to run a subscription upgrade process where you upgrade the price of all existing subscriptions.