Subscription Cancellation Feedback

WooCommerce Subscriptions does not record why customers cancel. The Cancellations tab closes that gap in two optional steps: ask the question, then group the answers into themes.

🎬 Video: see the Cancellations tab in action at the end of the Churn Risk video.

Both settings are off by default, and either can be used without the other. You can collect feedback and read it yourself without ever sending it anywhere.

Step 1 — Turn on cancellation feedback

Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Subscription Analytics.
In the Cancellation feedback card, tick Show an optional question on the account page after a customer cancels.
Save changes.

This is the only setting in the plugin that changes something your customers see.

Exactly what the customer sees

The prompt appears on the My Account pages, after the cancellation has already gone through — never before, so it can never delay or block cancelling. It reads:

Would you tell us why you cancelled?

This is optional and only helps us improve. Your subscription is already cancelled — answering will not change that.

Detail	Value
Field type	A single free-text box. There are no preset options to choose from.
Length limit	500 characters, enforced in the field itself.
Placeholder text	For example: too expensive, missing a feature I needed, no longer required…
Buttons	Send feedback and No thanks — the customer can always dismiss it.
Warning shown to the customer	Please do not include personal details such as your phone number or card details. Your answer may be summarised alongside other responses.

The wording is not editable in settings, but it is fully translatable. Every string is a standard WordPress translatable string in the plugin’s text domain, so a translation plugin or a language file can change it — including rewording it for your brand in your own locale.

Answers are stored against the subscription, so you can read them individually on the subscription screen at any time. The settings card shows a running Collected so far count.

Step 2 — Group the answers

Reading a hundred free-text answers one at a time is not a report. The second setting, Group answers with AI, sends the collected answers to your configured AI provider to be clustered into themes with a count each.

Set up an AI provider first — see Setting Up AI.
In the Cancellation feedback card, tick Send collected answers to your AI provider to group them into themes.
Open the Cancellations tab and click Group answers.

Use Regroup later to refresh the themes once more answers have come in. Clicking Group answers or Regroup sends the collected answers again and is a fresh billable request each time — it requires the manage_woocommerce capability.

What you will see on the tab

State	What it means
Setup needed	Cancellation feedback is off. The tab explains why there is nothing to group and links straight to the setting.
Collecting feedback	Feedback is on but fewer than 10 answers have been gathered. A progress bar shows how far along you are.
Ready to group	10 or more answers are in. Click Group answers to see the themes.
Themes	Each theme with the number of answers behind it, ordered by frequency.

The threshold is 10 answers. How long that takes depends entirely on your cancellation volume — a store losing a handful of subscribers a week will reach it in a fortnight; a small store may take months. Grouping fewer than 10 would read as far more conclusive than the data supports, which is why the button stays disabled until then.

Privacy

This is the one place in the plugin where customer-written text can leave your store, so it has its own separate setting and its own safeguards. Before anything is sent, each answer is:

stripped of email addresses,
stripped of web links,
stripped of any run of seven or more digits (phone numbers, card numbers, account references),
and truncated to 500 characters.

No subscription IDs, customer IDs, names or dates accompany the text.

Free text can still contain anything a customer chose to type, including their own name. If you would rather not send it anywhere, leave Group answers with AI off and read the answers yourself on each subscription.

Answers are not covered by WordPress’s personal-data export and erasure tools. They are stored as meta on the subscription, and the plugin does not register an exporter or eraser — so a subject access request will not return them and the built-in eraser will not remove them. Handle those requests manually on the subscription record, and see AI Data and Privacy.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to check
The question never appears for customers	It only shows on My Account pages, only after a cancellation, and only when the setting is ticked. A heavily customised or overridden My Account template can also prevent it rendering.
Cancellations made in the admin collect no feedback	Expected — the prompt is shown to the customer on their account page. A subscription you cancel on their behalf never shows it.
The Collected so far count is stuck at 0	Customers are dismissing it, or not returning to My Account after cancelling. Answering is entirely optional, so a low response rate is normal.
Group answers is greyed out	Fewer than 10 answers collected, the AI grouping setting is not ticked, or no AI provider is configured.
Grouping returns an error	Check Test connection on the settings screen, and WooCommerce → Status → Logs (source `subscription-analytics`) for the underlying provider error.
Themes look stale after new answers arrived	Click Regroup — new answers are not grouped automatically.