Subscription Engineer #24: Subscription as a Code

The reason why I’m bringing this topic today is the recent experience with one of the popular e-commerce platforms. We use it for one of our brands and we have a subscription there. This subscription is possible due to the use of several plugins. All of a sudden the Add to cart button disappeared from the product page. It took us a week and a lot of communication with multiple CS teams to fix it. For an issue like that it’s not normal.

Let’s make an assumption if next things could be configured not through some interface but via code:

• Company configuration (taxes, country restriction)
• Subscription plans (billing and shipping logic)
• Billing configuration
• Recovery logic?
• Product structure including bundle configuration
• Customer structure

I bet the immediate response will be - why, we have so much flexibility when all of it is done through the back office interface. And you are 100% but… But only if you are a small organization. What I see often in midsize and big organizations is the next:

• A lot of people have access to the system and they make random changes
• Lack of responsibility: “I didn’t touch anything”, “No one told me I have to follow new protocol”
• Inability to find what was changed and how to fix it
• Production misconfiguration because data is messed up

In case when the configuration listed above is done via code we get next benefits:

• Centralized control around who gets to change things
• Ability to test things on stage environment before they go live
• Ability to rollback changes if things go south

And from my perspective the last is the most important one. If something is off in your production environment and you can’t roll it back you have to stop all your marketing until it’s fixed and it could be fixed. Because of how modern marketing channels work it will take several days to bring you back to where you were in terms of CAC and target audience.

This brings us back to the principle of composable commerce when you build your e-commerce / subscription business. If you are going towards the path that I describe above you need to rely on a partner that allows you to architect things properly. As a starting point I recommend you to browse the MACH Alliance member directory.

By the way, If you have any questions - feel free to either ask them here or ping me directly.