Getting started with Subbly Guide
Welcome to the Subbly Platform Overview
This guide is designed to give you a comprehensive understanding of Subbly in just 10 minutes, helping you save countless hours when setting up your actual store. Whether you're new to the platform or looking to optimize your existing subscription business, this article will guide you through the essentials. Here’s what we’ll cover:
- How to start selling with Subbly.
- The Subbly capabilities that are essential for your particular business model.
- A quick overview of growth-related capabilities.
Let’s dive in 🥁
How to Start Selling with Subbly
Subbly is a powerful platform that enables merchants to sell subscriptions online. Whether you're launching a subscription box service, a digital membership, or any other recurring product offering, Subbly provides a comprehensive suite of tools to support your business. Although offline sales are set to launch in 2025, the platform currently offers everything you need to get started with online sales.
1. Starting with Your Website
Building your online presence is the first step to selling with Subbly. You have two main options:
- Building a Website Using Subbly:
Subbly offers over 30 pre-made templates that cater to various subscription business models. These templates are designed to mimic the most popular subscription businesses in each market vertical, allowing you to quickly set up a professional-looking website.
For example, the Weekly Mealz template is perfect for meal prep businesses, offering a ready-to-use design tailored to that niche.
- Keeping Your Existing Website:
If you already have a website or prefer using a specific website builder, you can seamlessly integrate Subbly into it. This flexibility allows you to maintain your brand’s current look and feel while taking advantage of Subbly's powerful subscription management features.
2. Integrating Subbly with Your Non-Subbly Website
If you decide to keep your existing website, Subbly provides two integration options:
- Embed Cart and Checkout Widget (Recommended):
This method allows you to embed a highly customizable cart and checkout widget directly onto your existing site. It ensures that the purchase experience feels native to your website.
After customizing the widget to match your brand’s style, simply embed the code into the<head>section of your page and add product buy buttons where needed.
For example, VisFoods successfully integrated Subbly’s cart widget into their Squarespace website in just 10 minutes, creating a seamless shopping experience. - Use the Product’s Buy Link:
Each product in Subbly has a unique buy link. By adding this link to your existing buttons, you can redirect customers to the checkout flow directly from your website.
This setup is ideal for those who prefer minimal integration while still leveraging Subbly's subscription capabilities. MuscleBox is a great example of a business that migrated from WooCommerce and chose to keep their existing website while using Subbly's buy links.
3. Configuring Customer Experience
The checkout experience is crucial for conversion rates, and Subbly allows you to customize this process extensively. You can choose from two templates and tweak over 20 parameters, including colors, fonts, forms, and angles, to ensure the purchase flow aligns with your brand identity and provides a smooth experience for your customers. Also you can adjust the branding of the customer portal. Read more here.
4. Start Collecting Payments
To begin accepting payments, you'll need to connect your payment gateway account to Subbly. While Subbly supports multiple gateways, including Braintree, PayPal, and Auth.net, we recommend using Stripe for its broad range of supported payment methods. Stripe not only handles credit cards but also offers options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Cash App, iDeal, Sofort, Bancontact, and direct debits. This diversity ensures that your customers can choose their preferred payment method, enhancing their overall experience.
5. Subscription Products
Subscription products are the core of any subscription-based business. At Subbly, we’ve spent 9 years perfecting our platform to meet the unique needs of subscription businesses, offering a full suite of features that cater to different models.
Depending on your specific business case, you may require different Subbly capabilities. But don't worry—Subbly has you covered. In the next section, we’ll guide you on choosing the best setup based on your business model.
The Best Subbly Setup for Your Subscription Business
Choosing the right setup is essential for maximizing the efficiency and profitability of your subscription business. Subbly offers a range of features, and the best ones for you will depend on your business model. Below, we’ve outlined the must-haves for all businesses, followed by specific recommendations for different types of subscription models.
Click your use case name below to navigate to the list of features you may need:
Real life service Access Subscription (i.e. Gym, CarWash, etc)
Subscription Box
- Offer subscription products with multiple plans and a fixed shipment schedule:
- 1-month no commitment.
- 1-month with a 3-month commitment at a 5% discount.
- 12-month commitment with a 20% discount. - Enable Gifting for this subscription product
- Use surveys to collect customer preferences
- Use one-time products to sell off previous months boxes.
Pro Tip: Configure customizable bundles to let customers choose specific items. The more items they select, the higher the discount they receive.
Sequential Subscription
- Set up subscription products
- Set up an automations to add inventory item based on successful shipments count.
Successful shipments count auto-increments every time you mark their order as shipped. You also can change this field manually, if customer wants to skip some specific shipments or was previously subscribed.
Replenishment
- Create a one-time product.
- Create a fixed bundle containing that one time product. Set up flexible plans allowing customers to receive shipments at intervals that suit their needs. Don't forget to add
- Include a survey with quantity type of a question, allowing customers to choose how many items they want to be delivered regularly. i.e. How many packs of coffee to be delivered.
CSA Subscription
- Create one-time products or import the csv of products
- Build a customizable bundle with any of the following pricing models:
- Discount per bundle.
- Discount per item.
- Percentage discount. - Use funnels to upsell extra products
Meal Prep Subscription
- Create one-time products for each of the meals. You can add descriptions which will be visible on the bundle selection.
- Provide customizable bundles with pricing based on the number of items chosen.
- Update the bundle’s items when menu changes. If the item customer chose before is not on menu anymore, they will receive an email prior to renewal prompting them to update their selection.
Content Access Subscription
- Set up a membership product
- Use the content feed feature to deliver content to customers
- You can limit specific posts to be visible by subscribers of specific plans only
- You can use tools like https://www.commoninja.com/ to embed interactive content into the posts: PDFs, forms, etc.
- You can even do online streaming via content feed posts by embedding iframe with the stream link.
Real life service Access Subscription (i.e. Gym, CarWash, etc)
- Use membership subscriptions
- Create a post in the content feed which contains a QR code for service access.
- To avoid abuse, i.e. screenshot usage, you can update the post on a monthly basis to ensure only actual subscribers provide it. - Customize the customer portal to reflect your service, changing terms like “Feed” to “Access Voucher” using the Translations feature.
Digital Subscription
- Offer a membership subscription product.
- Use automation webhooks to notify your service of new subscribers, renewals, and cancellations.
Growth-Related Capabilities
Once you've set up your subscription business on Subbly, it's time to focus on growth. Subbly offers several features to help you scale your business effectively:
- Predictive churn AI: Stay on top of subscription cancellations with Predictive Churn AI. Instead of spreading your attention among all customers, focus on those with the highest cancellation risk. Read the full guide here.
- Funnels: Increase conversion with a free product during the pre-purchase stage. Boost AOV with mid/post-purchase upsells. Don’t know what to offer? People love mystery boxes 😉. Read our detailed overview here.
- Automations Boost performance with automated actions. Get inspired by our tips here, and use SMS messages to communicate with customers 10x more efficiently than with emails (check our research on SMS messaging here).
- Churn optimization suite In the long term, a 0.1% decrease in churn can be more profitable than a 10% decrease in customer acquisition cost. Read about ways to optimize your churn here.
- Boost your LTV with complementary upsells Help customers engage more with your offerings by upselling recommended goods during checkout or in the customer area. Read how to enable here.
- Referral Program: Subbly’s referral program helps you leverage your existing customers to bring in new subscribers, effectively turning your customer base into a marketing channel. One of the most straightforward and easiest to set-up features. Read here how to set it up.
- Cart Abandonment Recovery: This feature helps you recover lost sales by targeting customers who abandon their carts. While saving one out of every 25 customers might seem small, the cumulative effect can be significant for subscription businesses.
Example:
- 100 people open the checkout.
- 75 people enter their email.
- 25 people complete the purchase.
- This leaves 50 potential customers who didn’t finish the checkout.
- If you recover just 4% of these customers, that’s an additional 2 subscribers (50 * 4/100).
- This increases your total new subscribers from 25 to 27—a growth of 8%.
- Over time, if your average subscription lasts 6 months, this could result in a 48% increase in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) from this feature alone.
Other useful features
- Email customizations: You have access to over 25 default email templates, all of which can be customized to align with your brand’s voice and tone. Additionally, you can adjust the styles of the template or disable specific ones as needed. A popular option is the "Upcoming Renewal" email, which you can schedule to send by configuring the "Number of days before the upcoming renewal event" on the billing settings. Another popular one is Payment failed which includes a link to update the payment method that doesn't require customer to authorize. Furthermore, you can create custom email sequences using automations to enhance the user experience.
- Dunning is crucial for recovering failed payments and reducing churn. With six default events that can be adjusted for timing, or the option to build custom sequences with Automations.
- Coupons: Coupons are a versatile tool used for cart abandonment recovery, reactivating past subscriptions, and attracting new customers. They are an essential part of any promotional strategy.
- Inventory Management: Subbly allows you to track your stock levels, curate subscription boxes, and ease the fulfillment process. This is especially important for physical product subscriptions where inventory management is critical.
- Analytics and Advertising Integrations: Subbly integrates with Google Analytics and Facebook CAPI, allowing you to track your performance and optimize your marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Subbly is a robust platform designed to support the unique needs of subscription businesses. By following this guide, you can set up your store efficiently, optimize your subscription model, and leverage growth-related capabilities to scale your business. Whether you're just starting out or looking to enhance your existing operations, Subbly provides the tools and flexibility you need to succeed.
Thank you for choosing Subbly. We look forward to seeing your subscription business thrive!