Last week the Tribe team travelled to Washington DC for the Recharge ChargeX. This conference was a celebration of the merchants and agencies that support the Subscription economy and was packed with product updates and inspiring talks from the brightest minds in business. In this article, we’ll take you through the latest Recharge updates and how they may impact your business in 2023.
Recharge Product Updates
There are fours big updates to Recharge in 2023: Bundles, Memberships, Rewards and Workflows.
Bundles are about to get better:
Recharge is the market leader in the subscription space but it’s bundling ability has always had room for improvement. This means that our agency often has to create custom bundling solutions or explore alternative partners such as Skio, However, dynamic pricing isn’t far away and this will be a game-changer for bundling solutions.
Recharge Memberships:
Providing a reason to buy and a benefit is central to the concept of Recharge Memberships which allows customers to pay a fee to join and unlock benefits. Members can pay an upfront fee knowing they can recoup these costs through different benefit options pulling customers to your brand – that may be access to content, free next day shipping or exclusive access to limited edition products.
Creating a digital membership product on your storefront and set it as the enrolment criteria when configuring a membership program in Recharge. When a customer purchases the product, Recharge will automatically enroll the customer into the membership program, process the recurring billing, and manage member tagging in Shopify.
Introducing Rewards:
Rewarding existing customers is critical for retention and Recharge have created a way to automate ‘suprise and delight’ mechanics based on subscription frequency. Similar to Klaviyo, with a ‘trigger-condition-action’ formula, there are limitless recipes to encourage retention. These could include cashback on current purchases, credits on future purchases or added value.
We often see the highest churn on the third order of CPG brands. Creating a reason to stay subscribed and form a habit is a great way to minimise churn and foster loyalty.
Workflows underpin these new features:
With bundles, membership and rewards all launching this year, the tools will be managed through a system called workflows. Workflows do already exist but will be increasing in complexity as these features roll out.
Most of the above features are only available on Recharge Pro and if you’re working with a partner, like Tribe, who have access to the Early Adopter programme.
Additional Updates:
- New affinity portal – this entirely new portal uses Shopify instead of recharge and will automatically inherit Shopify customisation
- API updates – Specifically, Recharge is launching Javascript SDK. This allows Recharge to be embedded into apps vis a browser with no middleware required and be twice as fast.
- Multi-Currency support – What is paid at checkout is what you’ll find in your customer portal to help with localisation.
- Combined Duplicate addresses – While bundling products can help mitigate for this, a common issue is duplicate addresses associated to the customer for each subscription. Recharge’s work to sync addresses now helps to ensure that a single parcel is sent with the relevant products to the one address. This will help the merchant to save on shipment costs, reduce unnecessary packaging and provide a smoother brand experience to the consumer.
- Partial Order Fulfilment – Now able to ship subscription if a SKU is out of stock, previously the entire subscription order would have been cancelled if one item wasn’t available.
We hope the above provides a good overview of how Recharge is evolving it’s offering for D2C brands. If you have any questions about subscription ecommerce, don’t hesitate to get in touch and chat with one of our experts.
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