Best Churn Prediction Software for Ecommerce Brands

In ecommerce, customer churn is when a business loses a customer. For a subscription-based business, churn happens when a customer cancels their plan. With a traditional direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, churn happens when a customer stops making purchases. Regardless of the model, business owners have to spend more on customer acquisition to make up for those lost to churn.

Churn usually has signals that your customer is drifting away. Churn prediction software helps merchants identify at-risk customers before they cancel a service or subscription, or stop making purchases. Read on to learn how churn prediction software works and discover six options to help you nurture long-term customer relationships.

What is churn prediction software?

Churn prediction software uses machine learning and AI predictive analytics to identify customers who are likely to churn. It integrates data from customer interactions, purchase history, and product usage (for service businesses) to assign customer health scores that signal who is happy and engaged or dissatisfied and disengaged.

Customer churn prediction software allows you to identify customers who are drifting away so that customer success teams can intervene before the relationship ends. When you predict customer churn, you can proactively address customer concerns.

How churn prediction software works: 3 models

• Subscription or replenishment
• Consumables
• General DTC

Churn prediction software calculates the probability of abandonment based on churn signals, or patterns in customer behavior that deviate from the norm. Machine learning models analyze thousands of data points, like time spent on a site and sentiment analysis of a support ticket, to build a predictive analytics profile for every shopper. 

Here’s how it differs for subscriptions, consumables, and DTC businesses: 

Subscription or replenishment

In a replenishment or subscription model, churn prediction software tracks customer product usage data and login frequency to create a baseline. 

For example, a coffee bean subscription customer usually logs in twice a month to manage their selections but hasn’t visited the site in six weeks. The churn prediction tool might flag a usage drop, identify them as an at-risk customer, and automatically trigger a “skip a month” suggestion instead of letting them reach the point of cancellation.

Consumables

For brands selling consumables such as beauty products or supplements, churn prediction relies on the time-to-next-order (TTNO) calculation. For example, historical customer data shows that the majority of customers buy a 30-day supply of supplements every 32 days. The software uses predictive analytics to trigger a targeted intervention on day 35. If a customer is late to reorder, the system might offer a small restock discount or suggest a longer delivery interval. This addresses potential price sensitivity or product surplus before the customer decides to switch brands entirely.

General DTC

When it comes to general direct-to-consumer brands, churn prediction software tools look for deviations in seasonal customer behavior. For example, if a customer historically buys winter gear every November but fails to purchase it by early December one year, it triggers the model to look at customer interactions across other channels. If the customer is still opening emails but not purchasing, the software might suggest they are price-sensitive and trigger a high-value discount before the season ends.

6 churn prediction software solutions

1. Shopify
2. ChurnZero
3. Zendesk
4. Faraday
5. Pecan.ai
6. Qualtrics XM

Choosing the right churn prediction software depends on the complexity of your business model and the volume of your historical customer data. Some brands may require enterprise-grade machine learning models to identify patterns in behavior, while others can effectively reduce customer churn using the tools built into their ecommerce platform. Here are the top options:

1. Shopify

Shopify provides built-in tools that allow even small ecommerce store owners to implement advanced strategies without expensive third-party software. The following features are included with all Shopify plans and can help with churn prediction:

• Customer reports. This tool uses RFM analysis to categorize your customer base into 11 groups, such as prospects, champions, at risk, promising, and almost lost. You can then apply effective retention strategies—like sending a personal discount to a previously loyal customer who hasn’t visited in 30 days.

• Predicted spend tier. This built-in AI prediction categorizes customers into high, medium, or low predicted spending tiers based on their unique purchase history. It helps you identify high-value customers who are showing churn risk.

• Shopify Subscriptions app. A free app that helps reduce customer churn caused by involuntary churn (like failed credit card payments) through automated billing retry attempts.

• Shopify Flow. You can automate your churn reduction by triggering loyalty app integrations when a customer moves into an at-risk segment.

Pricing: Free with a Shopify subscription, which starts at $29 per month.

2. ChurnZero

ChurnZero is designed for businesses requiring high-touch customer success management. It provides real-time customer health scores by aggregating data from your customer relationship management (CRM), support tickets, and product usage data. Here are some of ChurnZero’s strengths:

• Customer health scores. A dynamic metric that aggregates customer interactions, login frequency, and survey results.

• Real-time churn risk alerts. Notifies your team the moment a customer’s health score drops below a certain threshold. 

• In-app walkthroughs. Allows you to trigger educational content for customers whose product usage has declined, a major signal for subscription-based businesses.

• Segmentation. Build complex customer segmentation lists to target the most valuable customers who are currently showing churn risk.

Pricing: Custom and depends on scale.

3. Zendesk

Zendesk offers customer success tools that focus on the relationship between customer service quality and retention. By integrating your Shopify store with Zendesk, you can use its customer health scores to see which shoppers are experiencing friction. Here are some of Zendesk’s strengths:

• Sentiment analysis. Uses machine learning to analyze support tickets and flag customer sentiment that indicates frustration or a high probability of churning.

• Proactive messaging. Allows customer success teams to reach out to customers who have had multiple support interactions in a short period.

• Contextual support. Support agents can view the customer’s full Shopify purchase history directly within the Zendesk interface, allowing them to proactively address customer concerns with full context.

Pricing: Starts at $55 per user, per month (billed annually).

4. Faraday

While most tools use only your internal historical customer data, Faraday integrates its own proprietary Identity Graph—a huge third-party database built from compiled public and commercial records. It contains anonymized data on 240 million US adults (such as census data and real estate listings). The software uses a process called identity resolution to securely match customer contact info with these external data points. This allows the system to flag churn risks, like a customer who has recently moved or changed jobs, and suggests a win-back strategy before they lose touch with your brand.

Here are some of Faraday’s strengths:

• External identity graph. This predicts churn risk based on life events, such as moving or job changes, that internal store data cannot see.

• Adaptive discounts. Recommends the predicted discount level required to retain a customer.

• Lead scoring. Uses machine learning models to identify which prospective customers are most likely to become loyal long-term shoppers.

• Churn analytics. Provides deep actionable insights into why certain cohorts are leaving by comparing your data against broader market trends.

Pricing: Custom and typically based on a combination of customer volume (the number of unique records in your database) and attained performance tiers. This can include metrics like the total number of successful win-backs the software facilitates.

5. Pecan.ai

Pecan.ai’s Predictive AI Agent allows you to ask business questions in conversational language, like “Which subscribers will churn next month?” The AI Agent automatically builds a recurring predictive model tailored to that specific question. Once the model is created, it lives in your dashboard as a tool that refreshes your data automatically. The software continuously pulls the latest data to provide updated churn lists and monthly health scores in real time.

Here are some of Pecan.ai’s strengths:

• Automated data science. Builds accurate churn prediction models without requiring manual coding.

• Sentiment analysis. Scans customer feedback and support interactions to identify qualitative churn drivers.

• Predictive win-backs. Identifies the best time and channel to reach out to customers who are showing early signals of drifting away, but haven’t yet canceled.

• Integration. Connects with Shopify and common CRM tools to integrate data across your entire customer base.

Pricing: Plans start at $760 per month.

6. Qualtrics XM

Qualtrics XM specializes in gathering and analyzing customer feedback to predict customer churn. It goes beyond transactional data by using sentiment analysis to understand the why behind the what. Here are some of Qualtrics XM’s strengths:

• Voice of the customer (VoC) software. Captures real-time customer sentiment through automated exit surveys and pulse surveys.

• Predictive experience. Uses predictive analytics to link poor service quality experiences directly to churn risk for individual customers.

• Closing the loop. Automatically triggers customer service and retention tasks for your customer success tools when a high-value customer leaves negative feedback.

• Journey mapping. Visualizes the customer journey to identify friction points where existing customers typically drop off.

Pricing: Available upon request.