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
Starting May 14th, businesses are required to turn on click-to-cancel for all memberships. If you've updated or created new memberships, you’ll be able to protect your revenue while staying fully compliant.
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.
Reporting updates
We’ve made minor updates to the Memberships report to now capture the cancellation scheduled status, scheduled cancellation date, and cancellation reason.
You can also see the number of scheduled cancellations in the Memberships summary report.
We will be sharing additional information about an upcoming report soon!