Whether you own a beauty products store or have a dream of owning one, a beauty subscription box is a must-have for your product line. 

Here we break down 7 benefits of offering a beauty subscription box to show you why offering one can bring tremendous value to your business. 

1. Get Your Customers Excited About Your Products

A beauty subscription box can be a great way to get customers excited about your brand.

You can offer them a unique mix of beauty products each month through a curation subscription. 

Curation subscriptions are intended to surprise the customer with a selection of new items.

Subscription boxes can also be used to create unique beauty boxes tailored for a particular customer. 

Find something unique that makes your brand stand and create more appeal for potential customers. 

For example, Fashionsta offers a monthly beauty box subscription for $24.99 per month.

This box includes 5 to 7 full size beauty products that vary each month. 

Customers get to contribute to charity with each beauty subscription box purchase. 

Their products are also branded as being predominantly vegan and cruelty-free. 

These features add additional value to customers that want to do something positive with their purchase or be more responsible for what they’re buying. 

Additionally, Fashionsta offers a beauty subscription box for men, a great way to increase your customer base and overall sales .

It’s also a great idea to allow customers to personalize their own subscription box. 

You could give them the option to pick one item that they can receive in the box that’s customized for and by them. 

Another great idea is to create a poll on social media and allow the community to pick one item each month. 

Whatever the method, a beauty subscription box is a great way to expand your product line and get consumers excited about your company. 

2. Recurring Revenue from Subscriptions

Subscriptions provide your store with more predictable revenue and allow you to more easily forecast cash flow for your business.

When a customer signs up for a subscription they are ideally a customer for life.

Offering prepaid subscriptions for customers gives you guaranteed revenue before the product has even been delivered.

An example of this would be offering a prepaid subscription that allows customers to pay at a discount price for 3 months of monthly beauty boxes.

Subscription revenue can be a great asset if you ever decide to sell your business because investors like to see consistent cash flow that’s easy to predict. 

A recurring subscription comes with new things to monitor, specifically churn rate. 

We recommend monitoring two types of churn rate, customer and revenue churn rate. 

It’s important to monitor churn rate in order to ensure you’re benefiting as much as possible from your beauty subscription box. The idea is to keep your subscribers subscribed.

You can read more in depth about subscription churn rate here. 

3. Lower Acquisition Cost of Sales

One conspicuous aspect of offering a beauty subscription box is the benefit of lower cost of sales. 

If you offer subscriptions, your average cost to acquire each customer might still be the same, but the average cost for each box they purchase will go down. 

For example, say that it costs on average $5 of advertising spending to acquire a new customer. 

Before you offered subscriptions, customers would on average buy 2 beauty boxes, therefore your cost of acquiring each sale would be $2.50. 

Once you start offering and selling subscriptions, you can retain customers for a much longer period of time. 

With subscription offerings available, it’s possible to now sell 10 beauty boxes per customer and lower the cost of acquiring the purchase from $2.50 to $0.50 per box. 

Churn is inevitable, but the better you are at retaining customers the better your acquisition cost of products sold will be. 

This is true of any other overhead costs that you have as well. 

Your business will save money through economies of scale as you more efficiently sell to customers and your output grows.

4. Make Your Store More Competitive 

Nowadays consumers want even more convenience with online shopping.

Providing your customers with subscriptions makes for a more seamless shopping experience for those that want it. 

A beauty subscription box takes out the guesswork for your customers that would rather try new products from a source that they trust instead of spending time searching for themselves. 

Subscriptions also save your customers time by letting them avoid punching in their debit card each month for subsequent purchases. Not to mention they may take their business elsewhere if a competitor offers subscription services, and your store does not.

With each subsequent order through subscriptions you’re extending customer retention and the more you do so the less opportunities your customers will have to do their shopping elsewhere.

Each month that a customer is receiving a subscription beauty box from you is a month they’re not receiving one from a competitor. 

Some consumers simply prefer the convenience of subscriptions, consider how relevant services like Netflix and Spotify Premium are in our everyday life. 

Create a beauty subscription box your customers can’t live without. That’s the goal.

Subscription services are becoming more and more relevant for consumers and businesses. 

The subscription ecommerce market is estimated to reach an astounding $473 billion by 2025, this is according to Shopify. (link in source?)

This is a market that you don’t want to be left out of, especially if it makes up a notable chunk of sales for companies in your industry. 

5. Beauty Subscription Box Discounts 

When it comes to subscriptions and discounts together everybody wins. 

Discounts give customers more value from their purchases. 

It’s possible to offer percentage, set price, and fixed amount off discounts on subscription products.  

Say you want to offer customers a discount who prepay for 3 months of monthly beauty boxes. 

If your entry level beauty box starts at $50 per month, you could offer a 10% (percentage) discount and charge $45.

You could offer a $5 off discount which would also make it $45, if they subscribe.

Or simply set the price at $45 and make it a (fixed price) discount for subscribe & save.

The important thing is that customers feel rewarded for their loyalty or else they may not feel incentivized enough to subscribe without a discount. 

As a seller, discounts make more sense from a business point of view with subscription products because you are giving the customer a deal only if they commit to automatic recurring payments.

Remember that your acquisition cost per product sold is cheaper when selling subscriptions.

You’re giving up a little bit of revenue for either guaranteed or more probable repeat cash flow. 

6. Higher Chance of Up-sell 

People signing up for your subscription plans are likely to be your most loyal customers.

Customers place trust in your brand when they sign up for your subscriptions. 

Loyal customers means a higher chance of up-sell for your more expensive offerings. 

Say you offer three beauty subscription boxes with three different monthly prices of $20, $30, and $50. 

The majority of your subscription customers are likely to start with the $20 subscription and upgrade with time as they build additional trust for your brand.

Loyal fans may also be the first to buy new products that you offer in your store. 

Purchases of new products can be essential for getting the word out about them whether it’s through social shares or getting positive reviews from your most loyal customers. 

7. Beauty Subscription Box Inventory Management

With subscriptions, inventory can be a much more predictable game than it is for one-time purchases.

One-time purchases can have huge seasonal fluctuations depending on what you sell.

An uptick in shipments in November and December close to the holidays could leave you overstretching and then later under-utilizing your inventory space. 

Rather than experience an influx of one-time orders during the holiday season, with subscriptions you can stretch purchases deep into the next year with gift subscriptions.

You can take advantage of an increase in holiday purchases while increasing and maintaining a higher inventory. 

If you offer a year-long gift subscription this uptick in inventory will carry over into the next holiday season. 

Those receiving your gift subscriptions may even become long-term customers of your beauty subscription boxes after their gift subscription ends if they enjoy your products.

Inventory is easier to predict when you know how many customers are going to need orders delivered each month.

The availability of subscriptions in your store alone will likely increase your sales. 

You can purchase inventory with additional and more consistent sales which could potentially save you money with your suppliers.

There will also be more opportunities to utilize your inventory more efficiently if you already own a beauty products store. 

If you’re having trouble selling a new product you could include it in your monthly beauty box. This could potentially generate new interest in the product. 

Beauty Subscription Box Recap:

• Create a fun mix of products for your customers that keep them coming back (curation subscriptions)
• Consumers can have everyday items delivered at their convenience without hassle? 
• More revenue for your business
• Beauty subscription boxes can lock-in customers for a longer period 
• Recurring revenue helps with predictable forecasting of cash flow
• Convenience for customers that don’t have to place a new order every month 
• Stay competitive with subscriptions because it offer a service consumers want
• Consumers also win by getting discounts (i.e. prepaid, percentage, set price and fixed amount off discount types)
• Merchants win by offering discounts, they get loyal customers who make repeat orders
• Beauty Subscription Box companies use automatic recurring payments for their billing system
• Higher chance of up-selling to existing subscriber
• Investors like recurring revenue if you decide to sell your business
• Make your subscription hard to walk away from (provide value)
• Churn rate is a challenge, so pay attention to your numbers

Best Beauty Subscription Box App

Now you might be wondering how you can make a beauty subscription box a reality for your beauty products or cosmetics Shopify store. 

Maybe you even want to start a store from scratch. 

The best way to offer a beauty subscription box is through the Ongoing Subscriptions Shopify app.

Ongoing has an array of features that make subscriptions easy to manage and enhance your business. 

The app includes automated renewals and automatic recurring billing designed to increase revenue.

Ongoing charges your subscription customers automatically, which helps you earn recurring revenue.

Automatic recurring billing includes features that allow you to recover missed or late payments – meaning more, otherwise missed, revenue for your business.

Seamlessly install the app and create your first beauty subscription box in under a minute. 

Then utilize Ongoing subscription analytics to track your subscriptions’ performance. 

Ongoing is the best Shopify app to set up a beauty subscription box, try it out today!

Featured image credit: Products by Mender Photography by: Elsa Olofsson