Appstle Subscriptions
Bold Subscriptions
An Alternative to Bold Subscriptions
Why Appstle℠ Subscriptions is better
Keeping your e-commerce subscriptions running smoothly is not the easiest thing to do. Customer management, billing, invoicing, recurring payments, promotions management, etc. – all these aspects can have roadblocks from time to time.
To ensure smooth sailing, you need to have the best Shopify or Shopify Plus apps for subscriptions. If you have been looking for alternatives to Bold, you’re in luck! We’ll tell you all about how Appstle can make subscriptions better for your Shopify or Shopify Plus store.
To put Appstle’s capabilities into perspective from the start – Appstle Subscriptions ranks no. 1 among subscriptions apps for Shopify and Shopify Plus, and holds a high rating of 4.9 stars, with 2,700+ reviews.
Now, let’s look at why so many Bold subscriptions merchants are looking for an alternative solution and what makes Appstle a better choice than Bold.
Bold vs. Appstle – A snapshot
Features
Appstle Subscriptions
Bold Subscriptions
Easy migration
Efficient customer support
Flexibility to add new functionalities
Comprehensive features
Customer engagement features
Integrated checkout with Shopify checkout
0% transaction fees
Multiple pricing tiers covering
Enterprises and SMBs
High customer-centric approach
What is the Bold Subscriptions app?
Bold is a subscriptions app for ecommerce stores. It enables sites to add subscriptions at checkout. Among its key features are customizable onboarding sequence, checkout flow, and subscriber portal with robust APIs and webhooks.
It allows stores to choose and create custom subscription offerings with options. Some of the subscription types are recurring products, build-a-box, mystery boxes, and memberships.
This subscriptions app is available on multiple platforms such as Shopify, Big Commerce, Woo Commerce, etc.
However, the app poses some limitations and challenges to Shopify stores that are looking to scale or enhance the digital capabilities of their store.
That’s where Appstle comes in!
What is Appstle Subscriptions?
One of the best Shopify apps for subscriptions, Appstle enables businesses to offer products and services to customers, on a recurring basis, through different types of subscription models.
The app is a breeze to install. And, it allows easy and smooth overall subscription management. Besides, it has unmatched customization abilities, which help improve customer loyalty and increase sales.
Highly rated, with more than 2500 customer reviews, Appstle, is designed to simplify the buying experience and offer a smooth subscription journey to customers. Some of the key features of Appstle are:
- Quick and easy set-up of subscriptions
- Helps personalize promotions and upselling
- Easy management of subscription plans
- 24x7x365 customer support, guidance and assistance
- Easy set-up of multi-tier discounts
- Custom shipping, dunning, and cancellation management
- Real-time analytics
- Seamless, hands on and free migration from other subscription apps to Appstle
- Auto billing for subscription products, with multiple billing options (pay as you go (regular) and pre-paid billings)
- Unlimited, personalized email notifications to customers
- Highly customizable functionalities
Bold vs. Appstle: Why Appstle is the best Shopify app for subscriptions
Seamless migration from other apps to Appstle Subscriptions
As a business scales, its needs change. And it may need to do away with apps and tools that no longer support its growing business needs.
In many cases, the transition from the existing app to an upgrade has to be quick and easy – one that doesn’t halt business continuity. This is where Appstle wins points.
Bold has both subscription models defined by Shopify – V1 and V2. However, both versions could pose a challenge when it comes to migration.
Appstle, with the help of a dedicated migration team, provides 24x7x365 support to merchants – throughout the process of migration. This ensures merchants’ business continuity and operations are not affected during the migration process.
More importantly, Appstle easily integrates with other third-party apps across areas such as marketing, loyalty, help desk, page builder, and workflow automation. This helps expand the features on your Shopify store.
Here’s a quick recap of Appstle’s integration-friendly features, and what makes it a go-to for Bold subscriptions alternative:
- 24x7x365 support to merchants for a smooth integration process
- Easily integrates with third-party apps
- Makes it easy to expand features on your store
- Integrates with Bundle, Gorgias, Growave, Langify, Klaviyo, PageFly, Yotpo among other apps
- Find Appstle’s full integration list here
- Seamless migration from V1 and V2 apps. Supports 2.0 themes
Unmatched and hands-on customer support from a highly technical merchant success team
Customers always expect responsiveness and speed from their service providers. But with increasing competition and rapid scaling of digitalization of ecommerce businesses, there is unprecedented pressure to deliver quality customer support.
While customer expectations continue to evolve, there’s a wide gap between companies that have prioritized customer support and those that have not.
For Appstle, efficient customer support is a top priority. The app’s support features include:
- Dedicated product and customer support teams to assist merchants 24x7x365
- Hand-holding through various processes including migrations, whenever required
- Human customer support Engineers, instead of automated bots
- Easy to contact, through a live chat widget on the merchant’s dashboard
Here’s proof of Appstle Subscription’s customer support:
Easy and quick addition of new functionalities
Today’s shoppers or end customers, as we call them, are tech savvy and expect brands to offer top notch digital experiences on their site. To keep up with the ever-evolving customer demands, Shopify businesses have to keep adding new functionalities on the site.
Appstle offers the most comprehensive functionalities. Some of them are:
- Build-a-box
- Inventory forecasting
- Custom shipping
- Cancellation management
- Email notifications to customers
- Built-in discounts
- Pausing, changing, skipping orders by customers
- Auto-billing for subscriptions
With all these features that increase the efficiency, and customer experience, it comes as no surprise that Appstle is one of the most preferred apps for thousands of Shopify and Shopify Plus businesses – a strong alternative to Bold Subscriptions.
Better for customer engagement and loyalty
One of the fastest ways to grow your Shopify subscriptions business is to focus on your existing customers alongside acquiring new ones.
95% of customers say their trust in a brand makes them more loyal towards it. And to build trust, companies need to engage with customers.
To engage customers, brands need to know them, understand their needs, make their shopping experience easy and enjoyable.
Customer engagement and loyalty building through Bold has limitations.
The solution: Appstle Subscriptions.
Appstle has several features that focus on customer engagement and retention:
- You can use functionalities that enable upselling – offer better products/ services to customers that add more value to them
- Offer skip/ swap products to increase customer loyalty
- Create personalized experiences such as personalized emails to keep customers up to speed about their subscriptions
- Improve customer lifetime value by allowing customers to control their subscriptions – make changes to their plans, stop, swap, or skip deliveries
- The app’s 24x7x365 customer support ensures customers always receive responses to their queries
Multiple features required for subscriptions
Unlike Bold, Appstle has comprehensive features that allow maximum functionalities for subscriptions. Apart from basic subscription features, the app offers advanced and unique features that help boost retention, customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.
What is more, Appstle is designed for all types of merchants – whether you’re installing a subscriptions program for the first time or if you’re looking to migrate from one subscription platform to Appstle – it addresses all needs.
Some features of Appstle that enhance Shopify and Shopify Plus store capabilities for merchants, among many, are:
- Create different types of subscription plans such as pay-as-you-go, curated boxes, unlimited, fixed usage, etc.
- Subscribed product swap
- One-time product inclusion
- Auto billing
- Custom shipping allows customers to manage multiple shipping profiles
- Recapture failed transactions
- Real-time performance tracker
Here’s a review of one Appstle merchant and how they use the different functions:
Flexibility and powerful customization
Let’s suppose you are looking to develop a subscription model that is unique to your brand. With so much competition in the subscriptions business, it’s really hard to stand out in the crowd.
Among Appstle’s unique features is the flexibility it offers for customization. This enables brands to create unique subscription models that power you to outdo competition.
More importantly, Appstle’s dashboard provides customers with highly customizable functionalities. For example,
- Appstle allows custom shipping – merchants can create and manage multiple shipping profiles based on weight, order value etc.
- The app allows highly customizable CSS and functionalities from the dashboard
Ability to track subscriptions performance in real-time
Real-time trackers can help a great deal in every ecommerce business. For starters, it can tell you exactly what a customer is doing on your site – which product they are exploring or considering for long, etc. This information can help you predict the customer’s next action.
For merchants keen on utilizing the power of real-time tracker, think Appstle Subscriptions!
One of the best Shopify apps for subscriptions, with Appstle you can track the overall performance of your subscriptions in real-time. With that data, you can figure out what’s working and what isn’t, before it’s too late. Then, make necessary decisions for better performance.
For example, if your real-time performance tracker tells you a customer is about to cancel their subscription, you could instantly engage them over live chat or a call to understand the reasons. You could also setup automated workflows to offer ‘skip a delivery’ or ‘extra discounts’ and take other necessary actions to salvage the situation and change their decision.
Appstle also features an automatically triggered questionnaire to understand the reasons and retrieve customers who cancel subscriptions.
What is more, you can track detailed reports of revenue patterns and boost marketing activities to improve revenue during slow periods.
Compared to Appstle’s analytics, most other subscription apps’ analytics is quite basic, or is provided at additional charges.
360° customer-centric features
Apart from a quick and easy subscription set-up for merchants, Appstle is designed to offer a comprehensive suite of functionalities that keep the customers’ experience at the heart.
Appstle has higher competency for self-management. Customers can pause, edit, skip upcoming deliveries, add one-time products, update payment details, etc. This helps make customers’ lives easier.
To merchants, the app provides an easy and secure way to integrate checkout with Shopify checkout. The integration allows combined checkout and processes – for both one-time and subscription orders simultaneously.
Shopify stores can build both traditional and build-a-box subscription plans, which help brands tailor subscriptions to their customers’ preferences.
Subscription customers receive timely and personalized email notifications to keep them up-to-date about their subscriptions, orders, invoices, announcements about subscriptions, etc. This helps improve customer engagement and loyalty.
The app allows customers to save payment methods, change them, and automatically generates bills for recurring orders. It provides prepaid and regular billing options.
Pricing that suits all merchants
When it comes to investing in digital resources, most businesses are still struggling to make the right choices. While brands have rapidly adapted to digitalization and new business models such as subscriptions, they fail to maximize the capabilities of these digital platforms for their business.
The result: less profits, more expenses. This is one aspect where Appstle wins over Bold.
Compared to just two plans, Appstle offers five. Merchants can choose a solution that is within their budget, and suitable to their business size and needs.
Starting from a free plan to one that merchants can customize to their Shopify business needs – Appstle’s five pricing options make it easy for merchants to make decisions.
On the contrary, a quick look at Bold subscriptions plan pricing reveals limitations. Also, merchants have to shell out more in terms of seasonal and variable costs (i.e. transaction fee) compared to what they’d have to pay for Appstle’s compelling features for a flat fee.
Appstle pricing options
Bold pricing options
Ready to set-up/ migrate to Appstle subscriptions?
A large number of Appstle customers are merchants who are migrating from other subscription platforms. With our hands-on experience and expertise, we’ve undertaken many migrations from Bold to Appstle.
If you’re looking for an efficient alternative solution for Shopify subscriptions, reach out to us. Conversely, you could easily install Appstle and contact our support team
