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Shopify Subscription Apps: How to Add Product Subscriptions

Subscription boxes have increased in popularity across sectors like food, beauty, and pet care. It is projected that by 2026, this market’s compound annual growth rate will grow over 20% from its 2020 value of $18 billion.

Subscriptions are a staple business model in today’s ecommerce world, from SaaS businesses to clothing and personal hygiene. Customers and business owners love how convenient, seamless, and customizable subscriptions are, and every brand should seek to offer this type of product. But how do you launch a subscription on Shopify?

Tools like Upscribe can help brands integrate subscriptions into their store with ease. How do you add a subscription app to your Shopify store?

This article will outline everything you need to know about setting up a Shopify subscription app, including:

• What a subscription business model is
• What a Shopify subscription app does
• Why it’s important 
• How to set up a subscription app for Shopify
• What the benefits are 
• Which brands can use this type of app

What is a subscription business model? 

Subscription models allow customers to pay a given price on a regular basis to gain fixed or unlimited access to a designated good or service. Payments are taken at scheduled intervals and allow businesses to distribute bulk quantities of a given package, item, or set of services. The model brings ease to the consumer process for both businesses and customers.

This business model is becoming increasingly prevalent across software and applications. Products such as IT, food and beverage, apparel, FMCG brands, and more are taking on a subscription model to entice customers and scale their business potential. 

What is a Shopify subscription app? 

Subscription apps allow ecommerce stores to integrate subscription services into the website. The apps outline delivery, pricing, billing, and purchase option policies and contracts to guide payment systems, customer choices, and business administration. While a website can be individually coded to offer subscriptions, the technicalities are complex and not user-friendly.

Instead, the best Shopify subscription apps make it easy for brands and consumers to enjoy the benefits of this flexible and adaptable business model. With an app like Upscribe, ecommerce businesses don’t have to worry about setting up a landing page, checkout experience, discount method, pricing guideline, analytics dashboard, and more. Apps make it easier for businesses to launch services according to this model without requiring each entrepreneur to hire a team of developers to build the tools. This convenience will make you rethink any questions about how to cancel Shopify app subscriptions.

Why are they important? 

Using a subscription model is important because it encourages shoppers to develop a long-term relationship with your company and quickly turns one-time buyers into regular customers who make purchases on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Instead of repeatedly pitching new products or seeking new referrals and audiences, transitioning existing customers into repeat buyers is a strategic and wise business decision. 

In this process, subscription apps for your Shopify site are important because they offer more diverse tools than one could develop at a custom level. They provide granular data analytics and insights about product and campaign performance and customer preferences. Ultimately, the tools help brands scale and grow without requiring hiring or resource investment. 

How to set up a subscription app

Upscribe makes it simple for businesses to implement their first subscription offering in a swift, user-friendly format. All it takes is setting up your Upscribe portal, configuring settings, and going live. Here’s how it works: 

1. Connect your Shopify site

Onboard your ecommerce store using our seamless platform that is free of manual work or coding. You can get plans set up quickly, using templates provided, without developing each subscription from scratch. Using this process, you will:

• Quickly gain access to the administrative backend.
• Integrate product and meta fields as well as the cart and checkout processes.
• Customize the branding style of your customer portal.
• Adjust settings for the administrative side.
• Test the interface and subscriber experience.
• Migrate existing subscribers.
• Go live with new customers!

2. Build out the customer portal 

With Upscribe, you can create a seamless user experience for all customers. Using accurate branding, customer flexibility, and intuitive design, our customer portal setups help you reduce the amount of time spent supporting functionality.

• Customize the look and feel using fonts, colors, and designs that fit your brand guidelines and match your store without needing to code your own layout.
• Create a single-page location for all your subscription services to increase customer conversion and loyalty.
• Enable easy and quick information updates from your customer, so they can adjust their billing addresses, products, frequency, and more to keep their subscription up to date.
• Allow customers to rename their subscriptions so they can keep the product and services personalized to their needs and better understand how to make the options work for them.
• Reduce the cancellation rate by allowing customers to delay their purchases and update the contents of their shipments to ensure their subscription continuously meets their needs. 

3. Optimize the Merchant portal 

Our Shopify subscription app backend makes it easy for your team to enable these new purchase structures without developing an entire support department. The subscription planning admin tools allow you to respond quickly, develop resolutions, and see all of the most important information about each customer. To keep your customer information updated and accurate:

• View each customer’s upcoming and past subscriptions and their billing history.
• Preview their history of correspondence, including emails and charges to their account.
• Leverage filters so that you can see the most important information quickly.
• Edit their subscription preferences and payment and shipping settings to resolve issues that arise.

4. Use our administrator tools to generate more business

Our tools allow brands and businesses to quickly increase their subscriber rates without investing in major marketing campaigns that bring more work and staff demand. Our tools allow you to:

• Make pricing and product updates in bulk, so you don’t have to go in and make manual, one-by-one edits.
• Specify how you will enable the subscriptions based on specific products and variants.
• Send automated emails to customers with updates about their orders, transaction failures, expiring credit cards, and other payment issues.
• Offer add-ons to customers by enabling them to order additional products on a one-time basis.
• Provide discounts to customers at various order milestones to increase their loyalty and longevity.
• Develop a flexible platform that suits your customers’ needs, like pausing the subscription, to avoid increased cancellation rates.
• Automatically reactivate subscriptions and notify customers.
• Set up nudge campaigns that encourage customers to purchase and stay.

5. Continuously improve your performance through detailed analytics

Upscribe makes it easy for founders and ecommerce entrepreneurs to gain granular insights about their product performance, subscription preferences, and audience behavior. You can easily measure performance, see growth areas, and analyze elements that need improvement. 

• See overall metrics that give you a sense of your subscription success at-a-glance by tracking active subscriber counts, average value, and the total number of subscriptions. 
• Visualize growth and comparisons with graphs and visuals that show you new and canceled subscriptions or orders placed. 
• Adapt and pull the data into your other business development decisions by exporting it or pulling it through webhooks. 

What are the benefits of an effective subscription model? 

1. Ongoing customer engagement: Subscriptions often represent a commitment from the customers’ end. With a subscription, customers are more likely to continuously use a product or service and acquire an interest in other offerings provided by the same brand. With frequent reminders of the product through periodic engagement, brands have the opportunity to build a long-term relationship with their customer base through continued communication, interaction, and learning.
2. Reduced churn: Subscriptions offer a steady income stream option, where brands don’t have to continuously grow and develop a new pipeline of interested customers. With a pool of dedicated returning customers, brands can enjoy the benefits of a predictable and stable line of income that makes business planning more manageable and raises confidence in the business’s outlook.  
3. Opportunity for add-on purchases: The continued communication between brands and customers under a subscription model means that the brands have the chance to offer upselling opportunities to their customers repeatedly. By developing a long-term relationship, brands can learn about their customers’ preferences, needs, and wishes and create opportunities to solve those wants. By offering supplemental or one-time products and overall subscription upgrades, brands have the chance to continuously re-interest their customers and grow their business without generating a new customer pipeline.
4. Easy to measure performance: The impact of business changes can be easily seen when you have a consistently returning customer base through subscription services. By reflecting on metrics and longevity, companies can measure the success of their programs and initiatives and quickly learn where and how they can make improvements.  
5. Continuously grow: The flexibility and expansiveness of the subscription model mean that companies and businesses can expand their offerings and packages over time and bring their customers along with them. With periodic package upgrades, add-ons, or new subscription tiers, brands can adapt to the market and roll their existing customers into new programs that fit with the growth of their business model.
6. Offer a more customizable experience for customers: Customers prefer subscription businesses because it allows for a more convenient tailored experience. With the ability to offer packages and tiers, customers can engage at their chosen level and adapt the service to meet their needs. Plus, the automatic payment method is a more mindless form of engagement that is seamless on both ends.

Who can benefit?

• Brands that are new to the subscription model: Because Upscribe makes it simple to set up and get going quickly, brands that don’t have much time or resources to invest in starting their subscription offerings are well suited to the product. Ecommerce companies can begin offering their first subscription within five minutes after signing up, making it easily accessible and actionable for brands looking to branch into a new business format without bringing on a new team and stopping production elsewhere. 
• Brands that are growing quickly: The easily adaptable customer portal and merchant portal allow every-growing brands to continuously develop, alter their offerings, expand their services, and modify their customer access. With easy, quick edits to the customer experience and administrator settings, brands can make fast decisions and implement them quickly, with no heavy lift. 
• Brands that offer subscriptions as their foremost product: The robust offerings provided by our tools are in-depth for brands that focus on a subscription model for their business. The platform’s adaptability means that any brand that already offers subscriptions can benefit from switching over to our user-friendly and insightful toolkit. 

Transform your subscription business

Use a Shopify monthly subscription app like Upscribe to improve your business model, customer experience, and ecommerce growth. Use platform tools to convert existing customers into subscribers that engage through email, a user-friendly platform, SMS, and more. Offer new products to upsell each purchase, scale your company’s growth, generate new revenue, and reduce customer churn by setting up a subscription app for Shopify. 

Long gone are the days of seeking out individual customers for one-time purchases and spending extensive time and resources on developing customized subscription services that require huge teams, large support services, and technical coding. 

With Upscribe, the startup effort of a Shopify subscription service is manageable and seamless, allowing your brand to connect with new and existing customers.