Analytics platform

THE GOAL
ROLE

Transform Recharge into an analytics platform so that merchants know how their subscriptions are performing.

Product design lead

The problem

Feedback we heard over and over again in various product conversations was that merchants had a plethora of tools in their tool belt, each serving a different purpose. They’d use Shopify for ecommerce, Recharge for subscriptions, another tool for cross-sell/upsell widgets, and so forth. Analytics were another piece of this puzzle. In talking to merchants, we learned that they had a variety of ways they tracked their analytics. Often, merchants were building and sifting through custom spreadsheets to try to make sense of their subscription business.

The tools available to early Recharge merchants, like standard Shopify analytics, were built for one-time transactions. They could tell you how much revenue came in last month, but they couldn't tell you:

  • Why customers were canceling and when in the subscription lifecycle it was happening

  • Which customers were worth the most over time and which were churning after one order

  • Whether a marketing campaign actually worked or just drove a wave of subscribers who immediately left

  • What their revenue would look like next month before inventory decisions had to be made

Merchants were sitting on a goldmine of behavioral data, but had no way to read it. Most were making decisions based on gut feeling, spreadsheets, or not at all.

Why Recharge was uniquely positioned to solve this problem

Recharge processes subscriptions across tens of thousands of brands. That means it sits on something no individual merchant has: pattern data at scale.

A merchant might see their churn rate tick up and wonder if something is wrong. Recharge can see whether that churn rate is normal for their category, their price point, their billing cadence, or whether it's a real red flag worth acting on.

That cross-merchant visibility, combined with deep transaction-level data on each individual store, made Recharge the natural home for subscription analytics.

The evolution of analytics at Recharge

There are a couple of eras of analytics at Recharge that I was a part of. First, Recharge had no analytics at all, leaving merchants to completely look elsewhere for solutions or stay in the dark about their data. Second, the Looker era where we pre-built custom Looker dashboards for merchants. These were really powerful dashboards, but they were slow, expensive for Recharge, and not user-friendly.

Enter native reports

The first native dashboard—the home page

We knew we wanted to build a native solution so that merchants could seamlessly build their subscription businesses and know how they were performing all in one place. Where could we step into this to see? The home page. We focused on subscription recurring vs. checkout revenue, active subscribers and subscriptions, performance by product, customer portal actions, and retention—essentially a holistic view of a merchant’s subscription business. This launched in August of 2021. 

The very first Recharge native dashboard

Layering on improvements

The success of this dashboard was immediate and invited even more desires from merchants. My product manager and I chatted with many merchants to find out where their interests were. It was clear that churn was next up on the road map. A churn section breaking down active, passive, and churn due to subscriptions expiring was layered into the existing home page.

Other improvements that were layered in:

Comparison date range picker so merchants could compare current performance to past performance
A filter by product interaction
A filter by segment interaction
Display controls so merchants could slice their data different ways

Fast forward to now

Analytics has continued to shine in Recharge

Over the years, it’s been clear that analytics are important for merchants. In fact, looking at the current Fullstory dashboard on July 20, 2026, 8,994 unique users have visited our analytics tools in the past 30 days of 33,321 total users, which is 27% of all unique users. Tiers 4/5/6, which are smaller merchants, are our biggest users which tracks since large merchants likely have robust custom solutions.

Analytics usage in the past 30 days by top 3 tiers

Because analytics kept shining, we built a lot.

It’s hard to capture everything we’ve built because it’s a LOT. Here’s a quick snapshot:

  • 14 pre-built dashboards

  • 23 pre-built reports

  • 18 feature-specific dashboards

  • Analytics snapshot emails

  • A custom report builder

I’ll give some context in screenshots below.

Layering on improvements

Released in Jun 2026, the new list view helped merchants search and filter pre-built dashboards. This paves the way for a future custom dashboard world.
A snippet from our feature-specific Cancellation Prevention dashboard. This dashboards helps merchants understand customers' motivation for cancelling and if cancellation strategies are effective.
A feature-specific dashboard to help merchants understand how their checkout upsells are performing. It highlights revenue, impressions, and conversion rate.
A dashboard to help merchants understand the performance of their credits. How many were issued and redeemed? When did customers apply credits? What was the average balance?
This dashboard helped merchants understand how many failed payments (due to card expirations and such) were recovered and lost over time. 
Built in July 2026, this dashboard was designed to help merchants understand what happened between orders. Did most customers renew or cancel? Did they tend to take actions or not before renewing/cancelling? What actions?
The benchmarks dashboard helped merchants understand how their store was performing compared to other stores in the industry. 
The lifetime revenue dashboard helps merchants understand the impact of their subscription business compared to their non-subscription business.
This dashboard helps merchants look for spikes in order errors and figure out what's causing them so that they can fix them.

Other expansions

Reports

I won’t go into detail here, but do check out the custom reports case study to learn about our reports journey.

Reports list view

Analytics snapshot emails

Another thing we learned from talking to merchants was that their time was so limited. Even though we built dashboards, it still took time out of merchants’ days/weeks to click through them. We asked ourselves the question: how might we bring insights directly to merchants to save them time?

To answer this question, we built analytics snapshot emails that were delivered directly to merchants’ inboxes. 

Our analytics snapshot email that was intentionally designed as bare bones as possible as a hypothesis that non-marketing emails would perform well.

Tracking the success of some of these emails, we found that they performed above industry averages. The sales & subscribers email had 7.46 avg. clicks per user over a few months. The bare bones weekly summary email averaged around a 52% open rate over 5 weeks (a typical open rate is around 35-45%). These averages showed highly engaged merchants.

Analytics in Remi (an AI assistant)

With the rise of AI, one of the new goals for our analytics was to make them accessible through our chatbot. We wanted merchants to be able to ask questions about their store’s performance and get them answered, with the ability to see trends at a glance and export relevant data.

Recharge's chatbot, Remi, showing a merchant last month's top 5 products