Subbly is not only for subscriptions
Adding one-time store to your existing Subbly subscriptions is the most lightweight thing you can do right now to drastically increase your bottom line and boost revenue. Here's how you can do it today!
Subbly has always been marketed as a subscription-first platform, and that reflects how most of our merchants use it. Recurring payments, subscription boxes, membership products. That is the core.
What a lot of merchants do not realise is that Subbly handles transactional ecommerce just as well. One-time products, bundles, gift items, merch, overstock. All of it can live on the same platform as your subscription offering, in the same cart, under the same customer account.
When we look at our own data, we see two situations coming up again and again:
- Your one-time store lives on another platform. Your subscriptions run on Subbly, but your shop sits on Shopify, Wix or Squarespace, with Subbly bolted onto an existing site. You are running two systems in parallel.
- Your site is on Subbly, but you only sell subscriptions. No one-time products at all. Every visitor either subscribes or leaves, and every subscriber sees the same one thing on offer forever.
These look very different from the outside. From Subbly's point of view they are identical, and that is the thing worth understanding.
What this setup costs you every month
Subbly has a set of features built specifically to put one-time products in front of subscribers at the moments they are most likely to buy: during checkout, immediately after checkout, inside the customer portal, and just before a renewal.
Every one of those features can only offer products that exist inside your Subbly catalogue.
If your one-time products are on Shopify, Subbly cannot see them. If you have never created any one-time products, there is nothing to see. Either way the machinery runs with nothing loaded into it, and the revenue it exists to generate never appears.
This is not a feature you need to unlock or a plan you need to upgrade to. It is sitting in your account right now, waiting on a catalogue.
Features (and revenue) you’re missing on
Here is what each of these features could be doing for you.
One site, one cart
When your subscriptions and your one-time products are on the same Subbly site, they share a cart. A customer can put a subscription and a one-time item in the same order and check out once, paying shipping once.
If your shop is elsewhere, that is two checkouts on two systems. If you have no shop at all, it is one item and no chance to increase the order value.
Funnels: upselling during and after subscription checkout
Funnels let you present one-time products to a customer while they are subscribing, and immediately after they have paid. That is the highest-intent moment you will ever get with that customer, and it costs nothing in acquisition spend to use it.
Funnels also support conditional logic, so different subscriptions trigger different offers. Someone subscribing to your coffee box sees the grinder and the mugs. Someone subscribing to your tea box does not.
Finder's Seekers migrated from Cratejoy to Subbly and used post-purchase upsells through Funnels to offer discounted overstock immediately after checkout. This approach significantly outperformed the email-only promotions they ran before.
"Since implementing Subbly, we've seen a 327% increase in overstock sales, and we only wish we had made the switch sooner!"
Cody Dingus, CEO, Finder's Seekers
Read the full story
Add-ons Upsell: a shop inside the customer portal
Your subscribers log into their customer portal to skip a box, change an address or update a card. Add-ons Upsell puts one-time products in front of them while they are there. Warm audience, zero acquisition cost, and they are already logged in with a card on file.
Automations and the "Reply YES" campaign
This is the one most merchants underestimate.
Reply YES turns a renewal reminder into a sales channel. You offer subscribers a discounted one-time item just before their next box, and anyone who wants it replies with a single word. The item is added to their next order and ships with the box.
That is the whole purchase. The customer never leaves their inbox, and the card they already have on file covers it. It runs over email or SMS, and you choose the item, the discount, and whether it is a one-off or something that recurs.
One inventory
Every product in the same stock count, whether it goes out in a subscription box or on its own. One dashboard, no reconciliation between systems, and no overselling an item because two platforms each thought they had six of them.
Out-of-stock handling also works in your favour rather than against it. When an item sells out, Subbly can capture the email addresses of the people who wanted it, so you have a ready-made list to email the moment it is back. Demand you would otherwise have lost becomes a restock campaign.
What’s next for you (if your site is already on Subbly)
If your site is already built on Subbly and you simply have no one-time products in it, this is a small piece of work and probably the highest-return thing you can do with an afternoon.
Start with what you already own. You do not need a new product line. Overstock, discontinued variants, past box contents, samples, merch, gift cards. Anything sitting in a warehouse that is not currently sellable is the obvious first candidate, and it is exactly what both Finders Seekers and BusterBox built their upsell offers around.
- Create them as one-time products. Same product builder you already use for subscriptions.
- Wire up one mechanic to begin with. A post-purchase upsell in your checkout funnel is the usual starting point, because it needs no traffic and no campaign. It simply appears for people who were already buying.
- Then add the shop page. If you want a browsable storefront, the Agentic Builder can build a one-time shop with filtering and sorting on your existing site, connected to the same catalogue and cart.
Next steps (if your one-time store is outside of Subbly)
If your shop is running on Shopify, Wix or Squarespace while your subscriptions run here, there is a second cost on top of the missed revenue, and it shows up every month.
- You are paying twice. Two platform subscriptions, two sets of SaaS fees, and in most cases two payment processors each taking their own cut.
- Your customers have two carts. They cannot buy a subscription and a one-time item in one transaction. Two checkouts, two shipping charges, two chances to abandon.
- Your customers have two logins. Subbly issues a customer portal login. Your other platform issues its own account. Someone who bought a one-time item and later subscribed now has two accounts and no idea which one to use when they need to change an address. That confusion arrives in your support inbox.
- And you are absorbing the cost of keeping them in step. Every price change, every stock adjustment, every promotion has to be done twice and checked twice.
Our promise to you is that we'll move it across for you - for free. You do not have to rebuild any of this yourself.
- We will migrate your one-time store to Subbly at no cost. Products, variants, images, inventory, the lot.
- We will also rebuild your existing site on Subbly, free of charge. Designed to current marketing and conversion best practice rather than simply recreating what you have today. That means a checkout flow built around your subscription offer, one-time products positioned where they actually convert, and the upsell and cross-sell mechanics above wired in from day one.
- You are part of the process. This is not a case of handing over your logins and hoping for the best. You will be involved throughout, reviewing the structure, the copy and the design as it comes together, so the finished site is one you recognise as yours and know how to run.
What it looks like when it is working
Two Subbly merchants running both models on a single site:
Hatch Coffee, a specialty roaster in Markham, Ontario. Their homepage offers two ways in: subscribe for monthly deliveries, or shop rare, seasonal and core coffees as one-off purchases.
The Book Drop, a monthly surprise book subscription from an independent bookstore in Delaware. Subscriptions, a full one-time shop and a gifting section all sit in the same navigation.
Browse either site and notice what is absent: no second domain, no separate shop login, no handoff to another platform at checkout.
Where to start
If your site is already on Subbly, you can start today. Create a handful of one-time products from stock you already hold, add a post-purchase upsell to your checkout funnel, and watch what happens to your average order value over the next month. Nothing else about your setup needs to change.
If your one-time store is on another platform, email us at support@subbly.co and tell us where it currently lives. We will look at your setup, walk you through what the migration and rebuild would involve, and get it moving. It costs you nothing.
Either way, the revenue you are looking for is mostly in stock you already own and customers you already have. It just needs to be in the same place they are.