Overview
Appstle Subscriptions, while rich in the features offered in the basic tier (free plan), to enable our merchants to try and experience various functionalities, offers some very high in demand features in the priced plans.
This blog article will explain at a high level, what each feature is, to help you choose the plan that is the most suitable for your store’s subscription and growth needs.
Pricing and feature tier
Features:
- No. of Subscriptions: This refers to the total number of subscriptions that a merchant can have, under a particular plan. If there is a high demand for subscriptions from your customers, it might be beneficial for your store to adopt a higher plan, to capture all the potential recurring revenue.
- No Transaction Fee: There are several subscription apps and tools out there in the market, that charge the merchants a defined percentage as transaction fees, for every subscription order that your store gets. With time, this can be a lot of cost to you!
Appstle Subcriptions charges a 0% transaction fee, regardless of which plan our merchants are on. Yes, you read it right – 0%! - 24X7X365 Support: Support is an often-overlooked factor, which becomes front and center, only when there is an issue. The Appstle team (across all our products within Appstle, as well as our other brands on Shopify), has always aspired to be a true partner to our merchants. This means, being available all the time – 24X7X365, to help you with your queries. Our customer support team is available via live chat, email or phone.
When we say 24X7X365, we mean it! - Regular and Prepaid Subscriptions: When you – the merchant, create a subscription plan within your store, this feature provides you the option to set up the order payments, as 1) a pay-as-you-go model (where the customer will be automatically billed just before processing every recurring order), or 2) a prepaid model (where the customer will pay upfront for multiple future recurring orders). Our merchants sometimes wish to give a discount to their customers for pre-payment, and we provide a feature for that as well!
- Customized Shipping Profiles: With this feature, Appstle enables the merchants to create custom shipping profiles and pricing (including, but not limited to free shipping), in which they can define custom shipping conditions based on price, weight, geographical region, etc.
- Discount tier and loyalty: With this feature, Appstle enables you with the functionality to offer tiered discounts based on the length of an active subscription. For example, you can use this feature to set discount for subscriptions at 5%, for the first 5 deliveries, and increase it to 10%, after 5 deliveries, to reward customers for staying with you long-term, and continuously purchasing your product. In other words, you have the option to reward loyalty!
- Widget Display Modes: With this functionality, Appstle offers the merchant to showcase the list of recurring order frequencies, in different display modes! We currently offer most wanted diplay mode options such as drop downs, radio buttons, etc. You can choose the mode that best suits your store theme and customers. Why should Amazon have all the fun!?
- Advance Widget/Widget placement flexibility (Subscription Widget on Collection Page and Landing Page): Our subscription widget, by default, is super easily integrated with the product page. Moreover, we also offer subscription widget integrations in the collection pages and landing pages! This can be done by custom coding, by inserting snippets. The ‘Advance Widget feature’ covers this much coveted and high-in demand functionality. Our experience has shown that showcasing the recurring order or subscriptions option to customers in multiple places increases the probability of the customer opting for subscriptions, by 30%!
- Quickview subscription widget: Most customers these daysprefer the ‘quick-view’ of a product (for easy toggle and convenient browsing) than the ‘full view’ in the same or different browsing tab. Appstle Subscriptions’ quickview subscription widget functionality, provides the seamless and neat integration of the subscriptions or recurring order widget within the quick-view dialogue box of your store. This helps you convert and long term retain those customers that ‘Add to Cart’ from the quick view page!
- Cart subscription widget: With this functionality, any customer who adds a one-time product in their cart will be shown an option to subscribe to it, before the final checkout is done! Ideally, this functionality works well when merchants offer a discount (subscribe and save!), or any other perk (e.g. free or reduced shipping) on the subscription, to make it more attractive to customers than the one-time purchase.
- Personalized Email Notifications: Appstle encourages our merchants to have multiple touch points with their customers, at critical milestones in their subscription journey. A few ‘highly strategic’ touchpoints are when a customer subscribes for a product, when there is an upcoming order, or when their payment method – credit or debit card fails. Research, and our own experience working with ‘000s of merchants show that these strategic connects are critical for customer engagement.
Appstle Subscriptions’ email notification feature enables you – the merchant, to customize and send out powerful emails to your most loyal customers. - Custom Email Domain: As discussed earlier in this article, Appstle offers the feature to send out customized and automated emails to your customers at strategic points of their subscription journey. These emails are by default sent from Appstle’s server/email domain. However, we understand that some merchants would prefer the option of sending the emails from their own domains. Appstle accounts for this requirement and provides the functionality where merchants can connect their email DNS server to Appstle subscriptions, to send the emails (we have detailed help docs and a 24X7 available product support team, to help you with this!)
- Order and Customer Tag Settings: Appstle Subscriptions enable you to distinctly tag/mark your most loyal, subscribing customers and their recurring orders.
Once you set the tag settings on the merchant panel, Appstle will automatically apply the tags to all current and future subscriptions. - Subscription Contract Management: This feature enables you – the merchant, and your customers (if you allow), to change and modify the subscription contract. This includes skipping, pausing, or changing the delivery dates. This feature also enables you to have a specific date for order fulfillment (days of the week, or dates of the month), to simplify the backend of your store’s operations.
- Order Management: This feature helps the merchant to update all aspects relating to fulfilling a subscription order, such as billing information, shipping information, etc. The merchant can also set up auto email notifications to their customers, to confirm the changes.
- Subscription Product Updates (Product Update, Swap and Cycle): This feature facilitates the merchants, to easily change (add, swap, or delete) the subscribed product from the backend, in an ongoing subscription contract. There are multiple benefits to being able to do this. To learn more, click on our article covering the various use cases of Appstle Subscriptions functionalities.
- Build a box / bundling:- With this feature, your customers can club several products together, and check out as a bundled subscription. Every recurring order of that subscription will be of the full bundle.
- Subscription upselling:- With this feature, you – the merchant will be able to offer/promote additional products that your customers can subscribe to, along with the initial products they had in mind, for a small incentive. You can ‘upsell’.
For example, lets assume you own a household products store. If a customer is subscribing to baby shampoo on a monthly basis, with this feature, you can place a targeted offer for a monthly subscription of baby moisturizer, for a combined discount of 5%.
- Customized Customer Portal Settings: Studies show that a key aspect of customer experience with recurring orders, is a strong and easy to navigate customer portal. Appstle enables its merchants to provide an excellent customer experience, by creating a feature rich, convenient, and easy-to-use customer portal. Your customers can self-manage their subscriptions (skip, pause, change delivery dates) via the customer portal.
- Advanced Customer Portals: This feature goes over and beyond the regular customer portal settings feature, by providing you – the merchant, the access to the HTML portion of the customer portal. This helps you to have complete control of the customer portal’s styling, alignments, etc.
- Dunning Management: Simply put, dunning management refers to all actions taken to prevent and control involuntary customer churn. Appstle Subscriptions equips you with a set of sophisticated, yet easy to set up dunning management features, that you can use to automatically connect with your customers who have had failed transactions. You can have a detailed information regarding Dunning Management from this link: https://intercom.help/appstle/en/articles/5060975-dunning-management-in-appstle-subscriptions
- Cancellation Management: Retaining loyal customers and reducing churn is often the key to success, as it comes with lower cost (retaining customers generally costs less than acquiring new customers). This is especially true when it concerns your most loyal customers who have a recurring relationship with your store, through active subscriptions!
Appstle is one of the very few apps that provides ‘cancellation management’ feature, a key functionality, to not just avoid customer churn, but to also help you know the pulse of your customers. With this feature, merchants can manage the cancellation by setting retention flows by providing customized alternate options to customers, asking tactical questions to understand the cancellation motive, etc
- Summary Reports: To have a good overview of your store’s performance in terms of generating recurring revenue, Appstle provides this feature, by which merchants can receive daily summary reports on their subscriptions. Here is how a summary report from Appstle looks like:
- Advanced Analytics: A key element of business success is the ability to assess business performance in real-time and make iterative improvements based on strong data.
Appstle Subscriptions offers its merchants the analytics feature to review and analyse the performance of their subscription plans, and continuously improve and scale.
- Integration with 3rd Party Tools and Applications: Appstle strives to be a true partner to our merchants, and make sure that they receive the best and wholesome e-commerce store experience. For this, Appstle has partnered and integrated with other leading non-subscription tools available on Shopify. These integrations are seamless, and done with highly tested APIs. A few integrations we provide right now, are with Loyalty Lions, Klavio, Zapier, PageFly, etc.
- Dedicated integration engineer: Appstle offers this special feature, in which we assign you – the merchant, a dedicated integration engineer to help you with setting up and integrating Appstle to your store and theme. It is like a dedicated concierge service 🙂
- Custom Development: For the Enterprise customers, Appstle offers the option, where the merchant can get in-touch with the developers (through our chat widget or email), and ask for specific or custom features for their store. An engineer is then assigned to the merchant, to work on the request.
- End-to-end and comprehensive Membership functionalities: With loyalty membership plans, a merchant can create and operate membership or loyalty plans to their customers, providing exclusive perks such as early access, additional discounts, and free shipping, to their members, for a defined fee. Think Amazon Prime, or Costco Membership!
Currently, the Membership functionality is freely available in the Enterprise plan! To access the functionality, merchants have to install the Appstle Memberships app on Shopify. However, you do not have to pay any thing extra! Just ping our customer support (through the live chat or email), and our Support Engineers will provide you with a unique billing code, which will make the Membership app free for you (as long as you also have the Enterprise plan in Appstle Subscriptions!)
If you have any questions on the features and functionalities described above, please reach out to us at subscription-support@appstle.com. Our 24x7x365 available experts will be happy to assist you further.
