Pause vs. skip vs. swap

Pause, skip, and swap are the three lightweight alternatives to cancelling a subscription. A skip drops one delivery. A pause stops deliveries and billing for a stretch of time. A swap changes what is in the box without touching the schedule or the price. Between them they answer the reasons behind a large share of cancel attempts — too much product, a trip coming up, or simply the wrong item.

#Skip

Skipping moves the next delivery forward one cycle and charges nothing for the one that was skipped. Because unlimited skipping lets a subscriber defer billing indefinitely, a merchant can cap it — a total number of skips per subscription, a limit on how far a skip may push the next order, or both. The caps are enforced on the server and are off by default; see Skip limits.

#Pause

Pausing stops deliveries and billing for whole months. A dated pause resumes by itself: when its end date arrives, billing picks the subscription back up on the promised schedule with nobody having to do anything. An indefinite pause stays paused until someone resumes it. Merchants set the longest pause the concierge may offer, from one to twelve months.

#Swap

A swap switches the subscription to another eligible product while leaving the discount and the delivery schedule alone. Merchants can restrict swaps to a specific product list, or leave any active product in the catalog eligible.

#Where they show up

All three are available to shoppers on demand in their portal, and all three can also be proposed by the concierge as a save offer at the cancel moment — see What is a cancel-save flow?. The one difference: a skip offered to save a cancellation is exempt from skip limits, so a cap can never block a save.