Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Subscription services have become popular among online shoppers, but those same shoppers are also abandoning these services.

Through these subscriptions, customers make recurring payments and receive order shipments at regular intervals, and they have become popular because they let consumers refill products they need to replenish often, such as health and beauty products.

These services typically personalize orders based on a shopper's interests and style, which the companies often learn through connected social media accounts and quizzes. This experience mirrors the personalized service customers would get inside brick-and-mortar stores from sales associates.

So interest in these services has remained high, as 10% of U.S. shoppers have enrolled in one, and another 33% would consider doing so, according to the latest UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper report.

But satisfaction in these services is dropping, as 61% of those who have signed up have since canceled. And there are four main reasons why....

This holiday is poised to be the first mobile-dominant season for retailers and marketers need to be ready.

A growing number of Americans are turning to their smartphones and tablets as their primary device for accessing the Internet. In fact, one-third of all U.S. adults (33.7 percent) say they access the Internet more often through a mobile device than through a computer, up from 24 percent in 2013. Furthermore, Millennials are the first generation to be mobile dominant, with 53 percent of consumers aged 18 to 34 reporting that they use their phone more often than a computer to go online.

Considering that trend, it’s no surprise that when pulling data for our Holiday Hot Sheet series, we found that 35 percent of all Website visits came from smartphones or digital tablets during the week ending October 17, 2015. Shopping and Classified Websites, however, received an even greater share of visits from mobile devices that week, 44 percent to be exact. And some shopping sub-industries got a majority of traffic from mobile. Those included: Intimate Apparel and Accessories, which currently gets 55 percent of visits from mobile, Baby Products (55 percent), Health and Beauty (54 percent) and Ticketing (51 percent)....