Shopify Subscriptions – 8 Tips for Selling More!

shopify subscriptions

Written by Adriana Pope

November 27, 2021

Subscriptions are the best way to sell more on your Shopify store. By giving your customers a way to pay you on a recurring basis for a product or service they love, you both win.

Shopify subscriptions is the future of ecommerce. They allow you to get repeat orders and create loyal customers.

Whether you sell a physical product or memberships, subscriptions is the best path forward to increasing your store’s profit.

In this article we’ll go over the top strategies for increasing your sales with Shopify subscriptions.

1. Offer Refills with Subscriptions

Do you have a product customers would like to order frequently? By offering subscriptions on your store you can automate this process for your customers.

Customers can subscribe to the products they love with Ongoing Subscriptions.

For example, lets say I sold coffee, I could offer the bag of coffee as a subscription and let customers pick how often they’d like to receive it.

Ongoing subscriptions is a Shopify app that lets your customers easily receive the products they love on a repeat basis.

The customer enters their credit card one, and then that’s it! They sign up for products to be delivered on a repeat basis, and they’ll get charged automatically on a repeat basis as well.

Having your customers come back to your site, and re-order a product is a painful process for both them and you. You don’t want to have to spend a bunch of ad money to get them back to your store.

With subscriptions, you get a better ROI on your ad spend because all you have to do is get people to your store once, and get them to subscribe to products.

2. Create Enticing Subscription Discounts

If you’re selling a product you think people want to get delivered on a recurring basis, subscription discounts are your friend.

By offering a discount like 10% off for subscribing, this entices your shoppers to subscribe.

You can offer different frequencies such as “Delivery every 30 days” or “Delivery every 60 days”, this way your customers can choose how often they want it shipped to their house.

We recommend starting off with a simple subscription discount like 10% because it’s very alluring for a customer who already loves your product, and knows they want to receive it again and again.

However, it’s also very attractive for a new customer who realizes they can save money if they just subscribe.

Subscription discounts is a useful tactic for getting customers to subscribe instead of buying the product just once.

With Ongoing subscriptions, you can create subscription discounts to help encourage shoppers to subscribe to products.

3. Create Gift Subscriptions

Gift subscriptions aren’t just for the holidays, they’re good all year round!

There’s always a reason or a season for giving, so make sure to offer gift subscriptions on your store.

Let’s say I sold beauty products, I could put together a little box and create a 3 month gift subscription.

This would let the customer buy this product for a friend or relative, and be charged upfront a 3 month box. The receiver of the box will be delighted to receive a box every month for three consecutive months.

The beauty of gift subscriptions is that they eventually end. So person who bought it won’t be charged again.

We recommend offering gift subscriptions on just about any type of product you think people would like to receive on a recurring basis.

With Ongoing subscriptions, you can easily create a gift subscription for your shop and offer it to customers. This expands your current offerings and gives your customers more purchasing options.

4. Put together a Subscription Box

Creating a subscription box might not be for everyone, but it’s a great way to a new product that you can offer to customers who love your products or want to try out your products.

The best part about creating a subscription box is you don’t have to create a box before you launch it on your store.

You can create a pro-type of your box and describe the kinds of things people can expect to find and receive in their box.

Having a surprise factor with your subscription box is a great way to generate interest and get people to sign up for it.

With Ongoing subscriptions, you can easily create a subscription box with just a couple clicks.

We recommend starting out with something simple like a monthly subscription box, to keep things streamlined.

5. Try selling Prepaid Subscriptions

Prepaid subscriptions are subscriptions where a customer pays upfront for goods or services.

For example, let’s say I really like this one type of coffee and I’m going to buy it every month anyways.

I could prepay for my coffee and get a discount for subscribing.

with Ongoing subscriptions, you can easily create prepaid subscriptions for your products, so customers can get the convenience of paying upfront, for many deliveries.

Prepaid subscriptions are also great for you as a merchant because they give you more cash upfront which can help with inventory and marketing costs.

With Ongoing subscriptions, you can easily create subscription discounts for your prepaid subscriptions.

For example, let’s say I created a 3 month prepaid subscription with monthly delivery, and offered a 15% savings.

This is the perfect way to get your customers to commit to a longer subscription time frame, earn more recurring revenue, and offer your customers the convenience of subscribing.

6. Offer Pay per Delivery Subscriptions

Pay per delivery is the most common type of subscription people create for their products.

This approach is great because it allows the customer to pay for their product, and then receive it on a continuous basis.

The perk is that the customer can cancel their subscription at any time.

This low commitment appeals to customers who when they sign up your subscription plans, they don’t want to be locked in.

They are more likely to subscribe if they are allowed to cancel at anytime.

Your customers will most likely just stay subscribed, as the subscription business model is perfect for “set it and forget it.”

Most customers will only cancel their plan if they are dissatisfied with the product or the customer service, so make sure you are creating an awesome on-boarding process and have an excellent product.

7. Create an Access Membership Plan

If you have a Shopify store that can benefit from offering a membership, you can easily create one using Ongoing subscriptions.

There are usually a couple different types of memberships.

Some store owners want to sell a service like coaching and this is perfect for memberships because your customers will be charged on a recurring basis.

A Shopify app like Ongoing can handle the recurring billing for your membership which is super neat.

If you want to offer and accept recurring payments on your Shopify store, you have to install a Shopify subscriptions app like Ongoing to get this to work.

Ongoing Subscriptions can take care of all of your recurring billing needs.

Another type is access membership which is currently available on the Ongoing subscriptions app via customer tagging. Now you can segment users with customer tagging and use another app like LockSmith to block or give access to certain content on your site.

If you need help getting set up with memberships, contact us at Ongoing and we can help you out.

8. Make Subscriptions a Focal Point

Your website should be entirely geared up to push your shoppers into buying subscription products.

Shopify subscriptions help you earn more money.

Also, subscription customers tend to be happier because they get to experience the convenience of getting a product delivered to them on a repeat basis.

They also don’t to revisit your site when they need a refill, and can just get the product delivered to them whenever they need it.

One way to make subscriptions a focal point on your website is by featuring it on your navigation bar.

You can link to a collection of subscription products, or subscription boxes.

You can also create a call to action button on your homepage that says “Subscriptions” to get customers to take a look at your products available with autoship.

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