Selling Online Retail Subscriptions

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:

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

For any subscriptions with more than one coffee package, you need to create a bundle. Also, if your subscription is for a rotating coffee that is just one bag, you'll also create a bundle with the one product.

Here are the steps to set up your subscriptions:

Step 1

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

Subscriptions with 1 bag of coffee that don't change: After the coffee is set up in RoasterTools, you can jump to step 3 and map the subscription to the coffee.

Step 2

If your subscription includes more than one bag of coffee or is a single rotating 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 the same coffee: If your subscription includes more than one coffee product and the coffee doesn'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 product(s) 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 create 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 4

You now have the subscription products set up correctly and can map them to your commerce products.

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