The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced their final click-to-cancel rule, and this has led to some questions and uncertainty about selling your memberships online.
This article contains everything you need to know about our latest updates to the membership builder and client portal so you can stay compliant and protect your revenue.
What is the Click-to-Cancel Rule?
Starting this May, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will require businesses offering subscription-based services to make cancellations as simple as sign-ups.
What does this mean?
If you allow clients to sign up for memberships online, you must also offer an equally easy way to cancel online.
Clients cannot be required to call, email, or take additional steps beyond the original sign-up process.
If you enforce minimum commitment periods or cancellation notice periods, these policies should be clear, transparent, and accessible.
Businesses can offer retention deals or incentives, but only after an immediate cancellation option is presented.
The regulation goes into effect on May 14, 2025. After that date, if you sell memberships online consider turning on click-to-cancel to help stay compliant with the FTC's new regulation.
What’s new on Boulevard?
We’re making it easy to stay compliant and protect your revenue with these new membership safeguards:
Set clear terms at checkout
Boulevard is excited to share that you can now include client agreements when creating a membership that requires the client to agree to the terms at checkout both in-person* and online.
Adding a client agreement in Membership Builder
Agreeing to terms at checkout online
Agreeing to terms at checkout on the Duo App
*If you sell memberships in person and are not using the Duo App, you must use an alternative method to collect a signed client agreement.
If you wish to have the client agreement accessible on the client profile and client portal, you can instruct the client to complete the membership enrollment via self-booking on a mobile device.
Added visibility
These agreements will now be tied to client profiles and accessible within the client portal for easy referencing.
Make your cancellation terms visible on the client portal
In addition to the client agreement, the Membership Builder now has a section dedicated to client cancellation settings for the client portal.
The client cancellation settings allow businesses to separately highlight minimum commitment and cancellation notice requirements in the client portal, providing added transparency for your enrolled clients.
The best part? When you turn on click-to-cancel, cancellations enter a scheduled state until your set conditions are met. This means you can prevent early cancellations and give clients a seamless way to resume on their own if they change their minds.
When a client cancels and has not met the criteria for client cancellation settings, their membership end date aligns with the following renewal date.
For example, if a client’s renewal date is the 1st of every month and they cancel on March 19th, their membership stays active until March 31st, with the cancellation officially processed instead of the usual charge on April 1st.
Enforce your terms, compliantly
If you've updated or created new memberships, you’ll be able to protect your revenue while staying fully compliant.
If you sell memberships online and do not turn on click-to-cancel by May 14, you may be out of compliance with the FTC’s new regulation.
While we've added functionality for customers to offer their clients a click-to-cancel in compliance, it's ultimately each customer's decision whether to turn it on based on their own operations and assessment of applicable law.
If you do not have click-to-cancel enabled, a client will be prompted to email your location if they try to cancel through the client portal. If you want to change this, you can do so in the membership settings!
Cancellation reasons are required from clients and are shown in both email and dashboard alerts as well as their individual client profile.
Take action before cancellations are processed.
When a client cancels a membership through the client portal, the cancellation won’t process right away — it follows the cancellation settings you set up in the membership plan.
That cancellation enters a "cancellation scheduled" status, meaning the membership is still active in case you are able to convince the client to stay enrolled.
You can view all scheduled cancellations in the Sales > Memberships tab by filtering the status list. Clients will appear in order of the most recent request.
Click into a client’s profile to see their cancellation request date, reason, and when it’s set to go into effect. You can also see who initiated the cancellation in the ‘User’ column under Membership history.
The membership can be paused or resumed by you, if you reach out to the client directly.
To pause a membership in a cancellation scheduled status, you must first resume the membership, then click Actions > Pause
The client can resume the membership at any time before the final cancellation date on the client portal as well.
(Coming soon) Reporting updates