Ecommerce Trend for 2014: Buying Into the Subscription Service ModelCompanies like Birchbox and Bitters + Bottles illustrate the benefits of subscription services: recurring revenue and deep customer relationships.

Ecommerce

Healthful snacks. Underwear. Software. More types of businesses are employing e-commerce subscription models.

Led by pioneers such as Birchbox, the cosmetics service that claims some 400,000 subscribers, the model is being embraced at a rapid pace by consumers and the venture capital community. Zuora, a software-as-a-service company that enables subscription commerce and billing, announced in September that it had raised $50 million in a round of financing that brings its total capital to $132.5 million.