How Ready, Set, Food! Increased Their Margins by 35%
Ready, Set, Food! introduces allergens early in a safe and easy way to babies that parents can add as a mix into bottles or food. Their LA-based team recommends parents use their product for at least six months or until babies can regularly eat peanuts, eggs, and milk, making subscriptions a pivotal part of their revenue.
Challenge
In early January 2020 Ready, Set, Food! switched over to a subscription model. Parents wanted to try out their product; they hypothesized providing a 30-day guarantee on their first shipment would entice parents to subscribe. They first used ReCharge as the subscription platform for their Shopify store.
While Ready, Set, Food! quickly found offering a discount on their product for the first month doubled their conversion rates, they ran into major problems that hindered their revenue. There was a month-long issue where they saw a spike of store checkouts underway but not completed. They had to manually track events in the checkout funnel. However, they couldn’t figure out why the issue was occurring — even after contacting ReCharge.
“We could document there was a drop in our overall cart completion rates and tried to troubleshoot with ReCharge but never came to a concrete conclusion on why we saw these trends,” said Ryan Currie, Head of Growth at Ready, Set, Food!
When they submitted support tickets to ReCharge, the Ready, Set, Food! team also experienced long wait times before they received any sort of response.
“It wasn’t something we could wait a week or two to hear back on,” said Ryan.
After trying to get to the root cause of the conversion drop and waiting to hear inconclusive news, Ryan and the rest of the team decided to look at alternate solutions to ReCharge. Ready, Set, Food! realized they needed a partner that’s flexible, more responsive, and wants to grow with their team.
First, they looked at Bold Commerce, which didn’t check all their boxes. Then Ready, Set, Food! evaluated Sticky.io.
“Their pricing was out of line with what we’re looking for at this stage. We found we would have to pay thousands for single features like a custom subdomain.”
At other enterprise eCommerce brands’ recommendations, they went with Upscribe.
“Upscribe are more engaged. We see them as partners since their pricing structure only scales as we grow,” said Ryan.
Solution
Since switching to Upscribe, Ready, Set, Food! customers no longer experience slow loading pages and other issues checking out items. Along with no longer feeling that impact on their conversions, they’ve also had zero downtime on their site compared to ReCharge and a 10% higher checkout completion rate.
“We know the checkout experience is the same for everybody who goes through it and don’t have to worry about things breaking and being able to figure out why,” said Ryan.
They can even handle their own customer service requests faster. Upscribe’s reporting helps the Ready, Set, Food! customer service team resolve issues and complete refund requests.
For Ryan, he uses Upscribe’s reporting integration with Segment to have a data dashboard he can monitor that contains cart completions, abandonments, and what steps active leads completed.
“The fact that Upscribe integrates with Segment makes pushing data into other reporting systems a lot easier,” said Ryan.
Ready, Set, Food! also were able to build on their conversion rate success by offering a first-month discount. They’ve built a quiz funnel to capture more of their leads and provide that one-time discount.
“That discount offer is a primary way we can re-engage and get them back. Upscribe can handle only applying the discount to the first month, which helps facilitate the overall conversion.”
Ready, Set, Food! also discovered their 6-month package is their most popular subscription plan. With Upscribe, they now manage shipping so customers only receive two shipments. The first package covers the initial 30 days. Once Ready, Set, Food! find the customer is happy with the product, they send out a second shipment that covers the remaining five months. This drastically cuts their shipping expenses.
“Due to the flexibility of the platform, we were able to make changes to our processes that allow us to increase our margins 25-35% per order,” said Ryan.
As they continue to run different tests and expand their product offerings, Upscribe will play a major role in their continued growth.
“For people who are looking for a subscription platform where you can make what you need versus what you get, Upscribe is a really great choice,” said Ryan.
