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.
⚠️ Warning: Editing a live survey triggers a warning modal recommending against significant post-launch changes — duplicating the survey is the safer path. Once a survey is Active, structural fields (dropdowns, condition builders) lock; only text fields and toggles stay editable. To make structural changes, duplicate the survey or edit it while still in Draft.
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.
Pre-Survey Screen
Pre-Survey Screens enable merchants to present up to 25 native save offers before customers ever see cancellation reasons.
With no custom build required, merchants can now configure the screen to appear first in the cancellation flow. Customers will see all available pre-survey save offers up front and can choose to accept one immediately. This can prevent cancellation entirely or bypass the offers and proceed to the standard cancel survey.
To set up your Pre-Survey screen:
Select your Save Offers (all available save offers are available as Pre-Survey offers)
Add your Header, Body Copy, and Continue to Cancellation text
Select your "Offer Accepted" screen.
Toggle Show Continue Button as Offer to control how the Continue-to-Cancel button appears: when on, it displays inline within the offer list; when off, it displays as a pinned primary button at the bottom of the screen.
Note: If an Offer Accepted screen has not been configured, first save your Pre-Survey settings. Next, configure the Offer Accepted screen, then return to the Pre-Survey settings to add it.
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.
Use the Save Offer Selection dropdown to control how many offers a customer can choose from:
Single Offer: Displays one save offer with a shared Accept Button Text field.
Multiple Offers to Select From: Converts the section into repeatable Save Offer blocks, each with its own Offer Title Copy and Offer Button Copy, replacing the shared Accept Button Text field. Click Add Save Offer to add additional blocks.
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. Each delay option includes:
Copy (required): the label customers see for this delay option
Qty (required, must be greater than 0): the number of time units to delay
Unit of Time: choose Days, Weeks, or Months
Want to let your customers pause? Check Set Customer Status as Paused to pause the subscription for the delay duration instead of just pushing the billing date, 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
Design Tab
Configure the visual appearance of your cancel survey under the Design tab.
Styling Source: Choose Set Cancellation Survey Design to configure styling here, or Use Customer Portal Settings to inherit Card Style 1 from your Customer Portal Configuration.
Announcement Banner: Toggle on or off, with Background Color, Text Color, and Announcement Text (500-character max).
Media Positioning: Set Desktop Position and Mobile Position independently to Top (above copy) or Bottom (below copy).
Colors: Background Color, Text Color.
Selections: Option Background/Text Color, Selected Option Background/Text Color, Border Radius.
Primary CTA and Secondary CTA: each with Background Color, Text Color, Border Radius.
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.
Select Your Starter Node
Choose either a Pre-Survey Screen or Cancellation Reasons as your starter node. The starter node determines what customers see first when they initiate the cancellation flow.
Pre-Survey Screen: Select the screen customers will see when they begin the cancellation process.
Cancellation Reasons: Select the cancellation reason you want to configure, then continue building your flow.
Advanced Flows with Conditionals
Stay allows you to segment flows within a single cancellation reason using conditions.
You can branch logic using any of the following condition fields:
Segment, Subscription Status, Subscriber Status, Shipping Location, Zip Code, Churn Risk, Contains Bundle, Churn Risk Value, Product ID, Variant ID, Subscription Created At, Subscriber Lifetime Value, Subscription Lifetime Value, Subscription Order Number, Subscriber Order Number, Discount Code, Frequency, Line Item Type, Line Item Quantity, Line Item Unit Price, Variant Name, Product Name, SKU, and Punch Card Punch Count
📌 Note: Segment conditions currently support Is / Is Not operators.
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.
A/B Testing Nodes
You can add an A/B Testing node immediately after a Cancellation Reason selection. This allows you to test different Save Offers or Cancellation screens to determine which experience is most effective.
When configuring an A/B Testing node, choose how traffic is routed:
Use DecisionEngine: Uses machine learning to automatically route traffic toward the best-performing offer.
Manually A/B Test: Set the traffic percentage for each connected node yourself.
If you select Manually A/B Test, by default, each node connected after the A/B Testing node receives 50% of traffic, but you can set the % to whatever your test requires. This means that by default, half of customers who reach the A/B test will be routed to each screen. The winning node is the screen that generates the most positive outcomes (customers choosing not to cancel).
A/B Testing Multiple Surveys
Stay allows you to configure multiple surveys, and test which survey performs best by splitting traffic manually or segmenting by condition.
Click here to learn more.
Ready to Launch?
If you want to start simple, check out our Best Practices Playbook for a fast, operator-approved setup.