Looking for others who use the Square Subscriptions feature. How has your experience been?

[GFC25th]

Hi! I'm curious if anyone has used the Square Subscriptions feature for a subscription box of your products, and what your experience has been? I'm wanting to start a Coffee Subscription box and kind of just don't know where to start?? Would love advice or feedback from anyone who has it set up and tried it!

I'm also so lost on shipping! Would love to hear how everyone has shipping set up to make their life easier to offer shipping!

[GFC25th]

Hi! I'm curious if anyone has used the Square Subscriptions feature for a subscription box of your products, and what your experience has been? I'm wanting to start a Coffee Subscription box and kind of just don't know where to start?? Would love advice or feedback from anyone who has it set up and tried it!

[ryanwanner]

Hey @GFC25th !

I'm using the subscription feature for my bagged coffee sales. I like it and don't like it at the same time.

PROS:

-Pretty easy to integrate into your existing website. You can turn subs on for specific items or set up new items specific to the subs. I recommend setting up new items, then you can create a special subscription page on your site. Less confusion for your customers this way.

-Subs act just like recurring invoices, so you get an invoice payment on the day of the sub renewal. If you have the items set to print, it'll print on your systems just like a regular order.

CONS

-Shipping only. Which is super frustrating. However, if you use a flat rate shipping option, you can get creative. I dropped the base price of the sub by $6 which is my flat rate price. I then have a modifier asking for home delivery or shipping. If shipping, it adds that $6 back to the price. I need to do some creative entries when it comes to the accounting software so I track everything correctly, but it's the best workaround I've found.

-No customer facing management. If a customer wants to change anything about their subscription plan, they have to reach out to you. And you're limited to pausing or cancelling their sub. If they want to change the frequency, we have to cancel their sub and have them sign back up again.

Overall, it's a relatively solid product, but I believe that there's a lot that can be improved. It works fine enough for my usage, but if I was trying to get more intricate with things, I'm not certain I'd stick with it. There are a few third party addons via the App Marketplace that may do a better job with the more in depth offerings.

Here's my subscriptions page if you want to see what I mean by the Home Delivery hack.

[MPPicsNC]

I'm new to all of this. I sell nature photography as a side hussle with potential to become my 2nd act. 

for shipping and handling I rounded it to $25 flat fee.

I have no idea what I'm doing here but I'm trying. I have the square on my phone and the mag strip swiper. I have a blog on wordpress. http://www.magmapoflife.wordpress.com

many of my pictures are on there or on FB or Instagram under MP Pics or Melissa Pasek.

any advise is welcome. email me at [email protected]

thanks.

[BidwellPerk]

Great work, Ryan. I've had similar issues with the shipping/cafe pick up issue. I ended up creating two separate subscriptions items: one for coffee I'll ship that has a shipping profile for that, and another coffee item for pick up that has it's own Free Shipping profile attached to it. It still looks funny to the customer with that "Shipping Only" language Square places on the page, but I have a disclaimer like yours. 

One thing I noticed about your page is you don't list the size of the coffee bag the customer is getting. Has that been an issue?

[ryanwanner]

@BidwellPerk all of my bags are 12 oz with the exception of my espresso blend, so I assume the people looking at the subs understand that. It has never come up since I started the sub program. 

[sugarlab]

We use it for monthly treat boxes. We offer a shipping one and a pick-up one. The pick-up one is digital, so more like a membership, but it functions the same way. We have set pick up and shipping days. Then a few days before pick-up, we email those customers to get their pick-up time. Shipping folks otherwise get it shipped out to them on the day. We have them charged every month on their original sign-up date, versus having a pro-rated month and then everyone charged on the same day. Just doesn't make sense for our product, but I could see it working with something that isn't as one-time. 

Like Ryan said, making changes is a frustrating lacking feature. We have a customer who needed to change the address; I didn't want her to have to stop her subscription and sign up again (I'm always worried about making too many steps for customers) so I just remember to change the address when I print the shipping label. Thankfully, we don't have too many subscribers at the moment so it's easy for me to remember. Otherwise, I would have her re-do it. 

One thing I haven't really noticed (and maybe I've missed it) is the ability for someone to pay all upfront. Like say someone wants to gift someone a subscription, and pay for 3 months at once. That would be a great feature! 

[DinaLRosenberg]

We want to do this SO BADLY! We have been asking after this forever but need it to be way more robust than it is. I just can't put time into it until it allows customers to make a membership/subscription account so they can pause, change their address, change their payment method on their own. For a subscription product these are required features.. I've asked for them a gazillion times- not sure why it hasn't happened. (asked for this during COVID). 

[Doran]

I want to start something similar too!  Interested to see how other sellers are using the features available to make it work.  It is on my list to launch a box this fall. 

[doc_choc]

@GFC25th We use it but it really lacks flexibility and functionality. The bare bone of the system are there and working but compared to the other online subscriptions it does fall short by a long way. Because of this we have really not put the effort in to marketing our subscription and it kind of sits there withering away until we decide to remove it. It should be a pretty easy one to fix, just go out there and cherry pick the best functionality from existing subscription systems. Coffee subscriptions are a great example of where they have nailed this.

I love the way they allow you to build your subscription, step by step, giving the customer control of the process. Also like how they can tailor the wording to a brands particular language, which resonates with their customer base. I don't even drink coffee but it still makes me want to buy for gifts.

Above step by step

Below nice concise summary and flexibility to edit