Subscriptions (Recharge)

Product Overview

Subscriptions enable users to automatically purchase cases (or “boxes” as we’re calling them on the site) on a recurring basis.

We launched this product as a way to allow consumers to receive items directly to their homes on a regular schedule, whether they are simply looking to replenish products they know they already like or discover new ones. To that end, subscribers can choose to receive their boxes every 2, 4, or 6 weeks and the products they can choose from are as follows:

• Vliet (24 cans)

• Logical: (24 cans)

• Mixed Vliet/Logical (12 cans of each)

• Mixed Hoppy Ales (8 cans of Logical + 8 of two other IPAs, DIPAs, or pale ales)

• Mixed Lager (8 cans of Vliet + 8 of two other lager beers)

Vliet, Logical, and Mixed Vliet/Logical are all available to users as a subscription or as one-time purchases. When users choose the subscription method to purchase their product, the benefit to them is a 5% discount from the typical purchase price.

The Mixed Hoppy Ale and Lager boxes are available only as a subscription at this time. For folks that want to buy mixed cases only once, we are offering boxes such as these. The major difference is that the one-time products specify which items are in them, whereas the subscriptions only promise the flagship (Logical/Vliet) plus two other styles that we will curate based on availability. This method will enable James and Bev Ops team to manage the inventory (include inventory management here or link to it elsewhere).

Recharge integration

For this product, we're using a Shopify app called ReCharge. The checkout process is seamless to the user and ties into our fulfillment systems, inventory forecasting, and order management.

ReCharge seamlessly integrates into our ecommerce payments through Stripe, so this will show up on our reporting dashboard as a separate line item. For an example, see "Recurring billing by ReCharge" below

User Alerts & Management

When users sign up, a flow in Klaviyo enhances Shopify’s typical order alerts, so users can be notified about their subscription. We're testing two different templates that can be found here: A / B

In this notification, users get a link to a dashboard where they can:

• Easily change subscriptions: we provide customers the ability to update subscription options, like frequency, quantity and delivery schedules.

• Skip or reschedule deliveries: we provide them control to set delivery options.

• Swap products: we enable subscribers to easily swap out one subscription product for another.

Because this isn't live yet, we're still learning a lot and will add/edit this section as this progresses. For now, some views of the user experience are below. To see it for yourself, sign up for a test subscription and login. Just be sure to cancel when you're done, please, and inform the fulfillment team so they can remove it from their workflow also.

How do customers choose a delivery window after the first delivery?

• When a customer buys a subscription, they go through the entire purchase flow, including choosing a delivery window on the cart page through zapiet.

• After that first order / for future orders, ReCharge creates the shopify order automatically and assigns the same delivery window (a date that will then be weeks, months, or years in the past).

• We need a way to get the customer to choose another delivery window. We use zapier for that:

  • When ReCharge creates a new order that has Type = RECURRING, zapier will send an email to that customer and copy info@ to request that the customer respond to the email with a delivery time that works for them.

  • We then manually update the Delivery Plan or Delivery Future sheet with that delivery window and treat that order like any other delivery.