Online Retail Subscriptions and How to Set Them up in RoasterTools

Coffee subscription services are a great way to boost sales while building long-time customers from coast to coast.  Managing the subscriptions without some degree of automation can be a struggle.  These are some of your best retail customers and we know you want to provide them with the best level of customer service. 

Best Practices

Before we dive into setting up subscriptions, please note the steps below are based on best practices of how to offer subscription services that are automated (as much as possible) and decrease the chance of mistakes on your part. Assumptions:

• You have subscription services through your e-commerce platform.  We are big fans of using Shopify with the ReCharge integration*. 
• If you offer Roaster's Choice or Rotate the coffee sent, you create the schedule, and new subscriptions will come into your existing schedule. Example. For a monthly Roaster's Choice, you choose what the coffee is for each month. As new people start a subscription they get the coffee the month they order. (this vs each customer is getting different coffees which is very difficult (and manual) to manage)
• You have your subscription offerings set correctly in your commerce store with grinds as variant options (if you offer ground coffee).

Types of Subscriptions

There are a few different types of subscriptions that we will go over below:

1. A coffee that you send regularly (coffee selections don't change)
2. A coffee that is sent regularly but the coffee changes and the customer isn't choosing the coffee.
3. A subscription that has options of light, dark, or decaf but the specific coffee rotates.

Subscriptions with 1 Bag of coffee:

Coffee selection doesn't change:

After the coffee product is set up in RoasterTools, you can jump to step 3 and map the commerce subscription variant to the RoasterTools product variant that it matches. After that you don't need to update anything and you're all set

Coffee selection DOES change:

After the coffee product is set up in RoasterTools, you can jump to step 3 and map the commerce subscription variant to the RoasterTools product variant that it matches. NOTE: Each time the coffee selection changes, you need to go into the Commerce mapping page and update what coffee product the subscription is mapped to.

Here are the steps to set up your Subscription Bundles:

For any subscription with more than one coffee package, you need to create a bundle.

Step 1

First, make sure you've set up your coffee products in RoasterTools.  

Step 2

If your subscription includes more than one bag of coffee, you will set up a bundle. For help setting up bundles, check out our video walk-through below or read our bundle article.

Subscription Bundles - with coffee products that don't change: If your subscription includes more than one coffee product and the coffee selections don't change, you can set up a bundle with the two coffee products in it. Proceed to the next step.

Subscription Bundles with Rotating Coffees: If your subscription includes coffee products that rotate, you will do the following:

• Set up a bundle with the coffee products that you are currently including in the subscription

• When you change the coffee offering, you keep the existing bundle, but go in and edit what coffee product(s) you're changing to (see the video below about editing product bundles). The bundle will remain mapped to the subscription from your commerce platform (see step 4) and you will also have accurate information in RoasterTools about what coffee needs to be roasted and sent to those subscriptions

  

Roaster's Choice Subscriptions with options for Light, Dark or Decaf: For this, you will need to create a separate bundle for each option, ie Roaster's Choice - Dark, Roaster's Choice - Decaf. You will be able to map the subscription variant from your commerce store (Roaster's Choice - Dark option) to the bundle product you've created in RoasterTools (ie. Roaster's Choice - Dark).

(Note: You can't add the options of (dark, decaf, or light) in the bundle in RoasterTools because that option set won't be connected to a coffee product )

Step 3

You now have the subscription products set up correctly and can map them to your commerce products. Please go here for instruction in Bulk Mapping commerce products.

*We are partners with Recharge and may receive a commission if you sign up based on our recommendation.