Asian consumers are fed up with too many subscription services to choose from these days.
Digital payments platform Bango recently released a new report, “Subscription Wars: The Subscriber Strikes Back,” based on a survey it conducted across India and five Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) with more than 6,000 respondents. A staggering 81 percent of respondents expressed their frustration at the overwhelming number of subscription services available.
The report, however, indicates this doesn’t signify a desire for fewer options. Instead, 89 percent of participants said they would pay for more subscriptions if they were easier to manage, and 59 percent wished for a unified platform to manage all their subscriptions.
In the Philippines, with a sample of 1,025 respondents, most Filipinos subscribe to on-demand TV and film services (84 percent), followed by food delivery (47 percent), music (46 percent), and gaming (20 percent). Interestingly, 48 percent preferred the flexibility of one-month subscription plans.
Automatic renewals are frustrating for subscribers, with 72 percent of respondents expressing their desire to opt out of them. Forty-seven percent of the Filipino respondents also said they felt “locked in” to their current subscription provider.
Meanwhile, 91 percent of the Filipino respondents sought a solution in the form of “super bundling,” where multiple subscriptions could be managed in one place. Seventy-two percent of the respondents said they would trust digital wallet providers to provide this kind of service, followed closely by mobile network providers at 70 percent.