Your cancellation survey is the final operational lever you have to retain a subscriber. It’s where strategy meets execution, and where small decisions can have outsized impact on churn, data quality, and customer experience.
Stay’s Cancellation Surveys are built specifically for teams that need flexibility, precision, and the ability to iterate without breaking analytics. With Stay, you can design highly visual, data-driven cancellation flows that adapt to customer intent while maintaining clean, reliable insights.
1. Create Your Cancellation Survey
Stay supports one active cancellation survey at a time. This ensures data integrity and consistent customer experiences.
Best practice: Once a survey is live, limit changes to copy-only updates. Structural changes can skew analytics and make performance harder to evaluate.
To get started:
Navigate to the Stay AI Merchant Portal → Optimization → Cancellation Surveys in the merchant portal.
Click Create New Survey.
Update the default title with a clear, internal-facing name (e.g. Q2 Retention Flow).
Once created, you’re ready to configure the building blocks of your cancellation flow.
2. Set Your Data Foundation: Cancellation Reasons
Under Cancellation Reasons, click Add New Cancellation Reason
Type a new cancellation reason in the provided field.
For every cancellation reason you enter, you'll see it in the preview window on the right side of the screen.
Best practices:
Cancellation reasons determine:
What customers see
How flows are routed
What insights you collect
These reasons power your flow logic later, so setting them with intention is crucial!
Use clear, customer-first language
Limit to 10 reasons or fewer to reduce friction
Align reasons directly to actionable save offers
NOTE: Get more context on how to decide on your cancel reasons and save offers with the Cancellation Survey Best Practices Playbook.
4. With Stay's cancel survey builder, you can:
Randomize reason order to reduce placement bias, or
Manually order reasons to maintain a consistent hierarchy across users
5. If relevant, click the "Other" reason and/or the additional comments to enable these options.
“Other” reason: Will display an "Other" cancel reason. If selected, this allows customers to explain intent in their own words
Additional Comments screen: Will display an "Additional Comments" screen following the cancel reasons. This captures deeper qualitative feedback after reason selection.
Both can be toggled on and customized with your own copy.
Once you've enabled the toggles, you can see the preview of these screens by:
Clicking View in the preview window
Selecting the screen you want to preview
3. Configure Your Survey Components
Every screen after the cancellation reasons is modular and configurable. As an operator, you can build once and reuse across flows.
The live preview updates in real time, so you always know exactly what customers will experience.
Build out the screens
Save Offers
Save Offers are where you turn insight into action. Stay offers a wide range of configurable save offer types that you can map dynamically to different cancellation reasons.
Available Save Offer Types
Change Address
Route customers to update shipping details, ideal for address-related friction.
Change Frequency
Perfect for “too much product” scenarios. Offer up to 4 frequency options that permanently update the subscription's cadence if accepted.
Delay
Push the next billing date while keeping the same cadence. Supports up to 4 delay options.
Want to let your customers pause? Simply select the "Set Customer Status as Paused" option on your Delay Save Offer and tailor your copy accordingly!
Discount Code
Apply a Shopify discount code to the upcoming subscription order. Shopify subscription rules apply.
Gift
Reward loyalty with a free gift. Choose whether the gift applies once or recurs with each subscription order.
Swap Catalog
Send customers to your existing swap catalog to choose any eligible product.
Swap Custom
Curate up to 4 specific products to drive strategic swaps. This permanently updates the subscription item.
Custom URL
The most flexible option. Route customers to:
Quick Action flows
Landing pages
Educational or loyalty experiences
This is where you can get creative. See the Cancellation Survey Best Practices Playbook for advanced use cases.
Offer Accepted Screen
When a customer accepts a save offer, they land on an Offer Accepted screen.
You can:
Create offer-specific confirmation screens, or
Use a generic confirmation across multiple offers
Options include:
Custom copy
Redirect to a specific URL (e.g. loyalty, referral, promo)
Keep the customer on Manage Subscription
Confirm Cancellation
This is the point of no return, and a powerful final moment.
Use this screen to:
Reinforce brand value
Include videos or imagery
Make a last emotional or informational appeal
If the customer selects Back, they’re returned to their subscription instead of cancelling.
Cancellation Complete
Once cancelled, customers see the Cancellation Complete screen.
By default, Stay includes a Reactivate button that launches the reactivation flow.
You can also:
Redirect back to Manage Subscription, or
Send customers to a custom landing page with messaging and Quick Actions to re-subscribe
5. Determine Your Global Cancel Settings
Global Immediate Cancel allows customers to bypass your cancellation survey and save offers and go directly to the Cancellation Complete screen.
How to Configure
Go to Global Settings in your Cancellation Survey.
Toggle Global Immediate Cancel to ON.
Choose Who Sees It
No conditions added: All customers will see the Immediate Cancel option.
Add conditions: Only specific customers (e.g., based on shipping location for compliance) will see it.
Select Completion Screen
Choose which Cancellation Complete Screen customers will land on when they use Immediate Cancel.
Set Button Text
Add your Immediate Cancel Button Text (e.g., “Cancel Now”).
The text should clearly indicate the customer is actively canceling.
6. Build Your Cancellation Flow
Once all components are created, it’s time to wire everything together.
For each cancellation reason, you define:
What screen comes next
Which save offers appear
Whether offers are layered or skipped entirely
This allows operators to build highly contextual flows that respect customer intent while maximizing retention.
Example:
For sensitive reasons (e.g. loss of a loved one), you can bypass all save offers and route directly to Confirm Cancellation.
Whenever you add a Save Offer, Stay automatically creates an Offer Accepted branch, so no customer path is left undefined.
Advanced Flows with Conditionals
Stay allows you to segment flows within a single cancellation reason using conditions.
You can branch logic based on:
Products in the subscription
Shipping address
Other customer or subscription attributes
If a customer meets your conditions, they’re routed through the corresponding node, giving operators fine-grained control without duplicating reasons.
NOTE
You can segment flows by any saved Universal Segments you've created in Stay. Check out the article Creating Universal Segments for more information on how to create and save segments.
Ready to Launch?
If you want to start simple, check out our Best Practices Playbook for a fast, operator-approved setup.