Delivering a Bespoke Build-a-Box / Build-A-Bundle Option for Your Subscription Business
Looking to deliver a bespoke build-a-box option for your subscription business? We can help by adding a clean, intuitive build your-own box experience to your Shopify store that is compatible with Recharge. In this article, we cover the options of building a box, building a plan and having different pricing structures.
What to consider when creating a bespoke build-a-box or custom bundle feature
If you have a complicated subscription experience, such as meal-kit delivery that has multiple items grouped with specific fulfilment dates or a brand with a minimum order amount or quantity of items that must be delivered, you’ll need an extension to help.
This can be implemented via a bespoke application which can handle more complicated functions such as recipe selection in week 1, week 2 and beyond. Off-the-shelf integrations do exist, however they cannot handle the additional complication of the bespoke application and because they are third party, present a potential brick wall if developers find them incompatible.
Build-a-box use cases
There are a few key reasons you might want to roll out a build-a-box feature on your Shopify store:
- Offer customers the ability to customise their subscription box. For example, allow them to choose from a range of products or product categories that you’ll include in their monthly shipment.
- Give customers the ability to add one-time items to their subscription orders. This could be useful if you want to offer customers the option to add a gift or special edition item to their next shipment.
Build A Box / Build A Bundle Example:
Let’s take a coffee subscription example. A typical coffee subscription would have one single product type, e.g. coffee pods, delivered at fixed intervals. Nice and straightforward – but somewhat limiting.
Example 1: For a larger household or office, where a typical AOV will be higher, they would want a variety of products delivered – the basic subscription is not sophisticated enough.
Example 2: Customers may want a selection of products; e.g. a typical monthly subscription may include decaf filter coffee, standard espresso pods for X number of people and a unique coffee blend of the month just because someone likes to try new coffee.
This where a build a box comes in – you can set the quantity of items and product types but your customers get to choose. Engineering a higher order value and combination that suits the business goals such as a mix of product types or minimum order value to avoid lots of low-value shipments, this is important given P&P is often more than the product.
To reiterate the two flows:
a) Standard 20 coffee pods delivered monthly with MRR of £20
b) Bespoke bundle of products delivered quarterly with a Recurring Revenue of £75
The merchant wants to allow the customer to be able to manage their subscription plan on a regular basis without having to cancel their subscription every time, increasing the risk of churn. By packaging up a custom combination, the customer feels like their subscription is tailored, reducing churn, while the business can focus on more effective margins by reducing volume of shipments.
If you have products that complement each other, consider also offering customers the option to add them to their subscription orders as an upsell. For example, if you sell coffee, you could offer customers the option to add a cafetiere or filters to their next coffee shipment.
To summarise, build a box can allow you to:
Merchant: Which products and how many make up the subscription box? Can they add a multiple of each? It’s your choice to determine the parameters for how your consumers can buy.
Customer: This is really simple: pick what you love, get rid of the rest. Developing a bespoke box of product that feels like theirs.
Made for Subscription: Customers get their box exactly as they want it and delivered . They can update their box contents as needed from the customer portal. For Merchants that only want to sell their bundles as one-times, they can use the build-a-box feature without any subscription plan, using the Shopify checkout.
Understanding ‘bundles’ or bespoke boxes on Shopify and Recharge:
Understanding what bundles and subscriptions are, how they integrate with Shopify, as well as how they may be combined to get the most out of them, is critical.
Bundles can be defined as a “collection of product IDs bound together”. Businesses can use this feature to sell several products at one time achieving the increase of order value, enhancing the relationship with all their customers, and reducing churn.
Subscriptions, on the other side, are arrangements to receive something regularly, by paying in advance. With Recharge, you attach a subscription to the product, not a product to a subscription. This is why bundles or boxes are useful for grouping multiple items to a subscription.
Businesses implementing this model are able to see significant and sustained growth as well as higher revenues and customer lifetime values.
We can develop a clean, intuitive ‘build-your-own-box’ experience into your Shopify store, allowing customers to simply choose what they enjoy and get rid of what they don’t. Making a collection of products that is exactly how they want it.
Finally, the Recharge integration lets you sell your boxes via subscription plans, allowing your customers to update their box contents as needed for future deliveries while also increasing conversion and subscriber retention. When using ReCharge, and depending on the plan you choose, you’ll have access to different customer portal themes, as well as bespoke themes which we can create via the theme engine.
If you’re interested in offering a build-a-box option for your Shopify subscription business, please get in touch. We’d be happy to discuss your specific requirements and see how we can help.
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