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How Fitness Brands Build Mobile-First Payments That Reduce Churn
In health and fitness, churn isn’t always about disappointed workout participants. Sometimes you lose members who fully intend to renew but are blocked by failed payments or expired cards—and those are losses you can avoid.
The risk emerges in moments that matter most, where friction can stymie what should be an easy sale:
- New member registration (trial → paid), blocked by unoptimized payment experiences.
- Drop-in purchases that fail to turn into class packages.
- Unexpected failures in membership renewals.
- Missed opportunities for in-app upgrades or impulse purchases on mobile.
- Unreliable trainer payouts.
- Refunds and downgrades without recovery attempts.
- Frustrated customers during peak demand windows.
Across all checkout experiences, cart abandonment averages 70%, and subscription businesses are losing seven percent of subscribers each month to payment failure; these are cold hard facts, but also opportunities for improvement that can measurably add to your bottom line. For health and wellness brands, these are motivated buyers, as well as members willing to renew, that are slipping away for reasons that have nothing to do with your product—and that, with planning, you can reclaim.
The shift to mobile wallets and in-app purchases has raised the bar for checkout experiences with health and fitness brands, offering strong returns for those willing to make some changes.
Mobile Wallets Turn Intent into Revenue
Mobile wallets are often the fastest path from “I’m ready” to “paid.” When someone is signing up after a great class or renewing during a commute, you can reduce the friction that is limiting your returns: surface Apple Pay/Google Pay early, minimize form fields, and make upgrades into a one-tap process whenever possible.
Stripe reported that conversions doubled when Apple Pay was offered during an express checkout flow, rather than displayed only during the final steps. AppsMarket offers Apple Pay alongside credit card payment methods and is able to store both types within a single vault.
Regardless of device type, health and fitness brands can utilize a programmable token vault to collect and tokenize data once—or migrate existing data—then deploy it across any type of funds flow (signup, upgrade, drop-in, renewal.) The token vault is the essential foundation for any payments process, receiving and securely storing payment information, returning a token to the merchant which can be used to submit transactions to whichever payment processor makes the most sense.
Health and wellness brands no longer have customer data tied to a single PSP (payment service provider), making it usable with any payment partner, yet stored without bringing a payments system into PCI-DSS scope.
Geographic Routing for Renewals
Health and fitness brands operating in multiple regions could see as much as a 12% increase in revenue by offering the customer’s payment method during checkout. In addition to reducing cart abandonment by providing local payment methods, routing transactions to local acquirers can reduce cross-border fees and improve authorization rates.
By utilizing the issuer's country information from BIN details, merchants can direct transactions to the most cost-effective PSPs. Routing a renewal to a local processor or retrying the transaction with a local payment method can increase approval rates.
None of this is possible without being able to access and use payment data in a secure, compliant way.
Treat Bank Details like Card Data
Fitness marketplaces or studios are increasingly delivering payouts to trainers, affiliates, and franchisees through bank-to-bank transactions. These bank details are just as sensitive as card data.
By storing bank account details in a programmable payments vault, bank-to-bank orchestration can be managed without any data being exposed to internal systems. With fewer systems touching raw bank details, payouts happen with minimal compliance scope, on time, and at low cost.
Reducing Disputes
As VAMP thresholds tighten and PSPs face stricter monitoring and remediation requirements on chargebacks, reducing promotion abuse and friendly fraud is critical to the health and fitness industry in 2026.
Having a single, consistent set of rules for handling refund logic with any PSP is recommended, along with capturing metadata for dispute responses or reporting. Merchants are also looking into using Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, to help identify troubling patterns and stop abuse before it threatens to create chargeback challenges.
What to Measure
How will you know if your payments are operating as a lean, mean processing machine?
- Measure your mobile checkout conversion rate.
- Know what the authorization rates are by processor, issuer, and region.
- Track the percentage of failed renewals being recovered
- Understand your involuntary churn rate each month and monitor improvement as you institute changes
If you’re planning a mobile checkout refresh in 2026, start with two questions:
- How quickly can a motivated member pay on mobile?
- How consistently do you recover failed renewals across payment methods and providers?
Our team will be attending the Connected: Health and Fitness Summit in February—will we see you in Los Angeles? Reach out to connect or download our health and fitness payments checklist to evaluate your own architecture.
