By Minal Bopaiah

This year has started off with fire alarms for subscription sites after Target announced that 40 million of its customers’ credit card account numbers had been stolen, and Chase announced its plans to switch out 16 million MasterCard credit and debit cards for Visa cards.

Both of these developments are going to cause headaches for subscription sites as customers are forced to change their account numbers, since those new account numbers will lead to more card declines, lower retention rates, and lower longterm revenues.

And now there’s more news that just makes things worse.

Apparently, Target’s breach is expected to affect 70 million customers — 30 million over the initial estimate — and not only were account numbers stolen, but names, emails and phone numbers, too. Furthermore, Nieman Marcus just announced that it, too, was the victim of a similar breach.

There’s no word yet on how many cards were compromised because of the Neiman breach, but we can expect it to be in the millions since Neiman Marcuse said the breach occurred over many days over the holiday shopping season.

There’s also a possibility that another major retailer was hit, which would further increase the number of account numbers changing this year.

Therefore, subscription sites need to be adequately prepared this year for an increased number of card declines and account changes. The single best way to manage this sort of impending revenue threat is through automated technology like Account Updater. Click on our Member Resources below to find out how you can use Account Updater to maintain and increase your bottom-line profits!