Does anyone offer subscription boxes?

[MyHoneybee]

Hello,

We plan to offer subscription boxes on a quarterly basis and am looking for best way to set up. Does anyone else offer these and how did you set up in Square? 

Did you add a button (with link) to your website for people to enroll or do you send an email link each month or just manually invoice? Do you permit customers to join at your B & M checkout counter?

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

[Tammyp64]

Will be keeping an eye on this thread. I am getting ready to start a quarterly subscription box for our customers. Nothing big, starting with about 8 boxes but, am looking for all the info I can to make it worth while and cost efficient.

[JJ_]

Hey there @MyHoneybee and @Tammyp64

The only way I see this being possible would be using Square Online Checkout links and setting them up as subscriptions. 

Here's how to setup a Checkout link:

1. Head to the Homepage of your online Square Dashboard.

2. Click Create checkout link in the Online Checkout section.

3. Choose either Collect payments, or Accept Donations.

4. Enter a name for your link, this will be displayed to the customer (If prompted, enter the amount you want to charge.)

5. Accept recurring payments by selecting a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual payment frequency. 

6. Click Advanced Settings to toggle on Allow buyer to set the price. 

7. You can also Allow one-time payments from your customer in Advanced Settings. This will give your customers the option to choose whether they’d like to pay for their purchase once or sign up for a weekly or monthly payment plan. This option is selected by default for Accept Donations links. 

8. Click Save to create a checkout link.

9. Select Copy, and share the link anywhere.

I hope this information is helpful! You can find out more about Checkout Links and Subscriptions here

[MyHoneybee]

Thank you! I actually tested this method yesterday with adding the link to my website and an email campaign and it tested perfect except for two items. It took the payment automatically that day but I was hoping to set the payment date two weeks prior to when subscription box would be mailed. Also, it doesn’t have a place to add ship to address for mailing boxes. Any suggestions for this? 

[HC_Charlie]

@MyHoneybeeI think I found a way to create a checkout link for subscriptions. Not sure if you can capture the shipping address but here's what I found...

Go into your Square Dashboard >> Online >> ...then go back up to your menu (three lines) at the top corner and select Online Checkout in the bottom row.

I think selecting this you can then select Subscriptions... and then make a plan.

[MyHoneybee]

Thank you!

[Pintuna]

Hi @MyHoneybee, one of our merchant customers recently asked us to capture the customer's address and a couple of other pieces of information through the Online Checkout feature. Unfortunately that is not possible.

The Online Checkout feature is great for collecting payments from a large group of customers but currently does not offer any customization capability for collecting additional customer information.

We ended up developing a custom subscription form for them using Square APIs. All the information is still saved in Square but using our front end. Will be happy to showcase the solution if that would help.

[MyHoneybee]

Yes, please.

[Pintuna]

Hi @MyHoneybee , send me an email [redacted for privacy] with some times and I can schedule a demo. I'm in in California so PST.

[DinaLRosenberg]

We want to offer subscriptions but at the time Square doesn't have the features necessary to make it seamless. What we do instead is offer seasonal mystery boxes every other month. These have been a great hit. It's a pretty good solution until square rolls out full subscription functionality.

[Arie]

Thanks for letting us know this is still something you're hoping we improve, @DinaLRosenberg - we value your feedback, and posts in the community! 

[DinaLRosenberg]

Thanks. I had a convo with someone on the subscription team- we definitely need clients to be able to manage their own subscription (login, change CC, change address, pause etc).

[LarsonsGeneral]

We WOULD do subscription boxes, but from my understanding there is no way to add inventory items to the box. Just a generic subscription where I would have to manually remove items from my inventory to keep the numbers right. Which would be a non-issue if Square would just make a "gift box" feature that allowed multiple SKUs to be added to one "product". 

That brings up another issue.. No functionality for multiple SKUs for one item (ordering an item in a 6-pack but selling individually). This makes receiving inventory a headache too. 

[JJ_]

I definitely get the struggle of missing a way to bundle up items into a single item (in this case a box). I will make sure that our product team gets visibility on this matter. Thank you for taking the time to share both your interest and your experience @LarsonsGeneral.

[LarsonsGeneral]

Thank you for the response JJ_!

[FGFgifts]

@LarsonsGeneral @JJ_ 

We've been having the same struggle (but with gift baskets that we build from our on-the-shelf inventory) since we joined up several years ago and were told it was "in the works." 😕

We used to use Quickbook Point of Sale, which had options to "build" and "break" items that were categorized as "assembly" items. Essentially they allowed us to create an "assembly" item and list out the other items that went into it. We could tell it to "build" (or "break") x-number of that "assembly" item and it would automatically adjust the inventory quantities for the assemblies and individual items. Currently we have to do it manually One. At. A. Time. for every individual item and assembled basket. Very time consuming, and LOTS of room for errors.

There was also a similar function for "group" items, but instead of "building/breaking" them and adding/removing from inventory, it only tracked inventory on the original individual items, and if you sold a "group" item it would adjust the inventory on the individual items that made it up accordingly.

So I've requested this for gift baskets, I've seen it requested for things like combo meals for restaurants, and now it would be useful for subscription boxes. Do we have enough uses yet for it to be moved up the feature request list?

[MyHoneybee]

Thank you! As a work around I am using the digital subscription for sign up and the recurring payments and just manually adjusting inventory for items in the box. Not ideal but wanted to offer subscription boxes to our customers. Our first box ships April 1st and has been a labor of love with a lot of hard work added!

[Cpassetto]

I want to do subscription boxes but need it to have the ability for them to enter their address to mail to and to allow it to be edited if they move.

[JJ_]

Thank you for taking the time to share your interest in this feature @Cpassetto. We have implemented a new way to report and track feature requests.  I recommend you submit a Feature Request here. This will help our product team get visibility and track other Sellers' interest in your request.

Important: When submitting a request, make sure to include the desired feature, and provide the details of how this feature will help your business succeed (how would you use it and what you expect from it).

[Bronze_Palms · Accepted solution]

YES

Set it up like this

Navigate to Plan or Subscription. Get to Plans > Create Plan > Set up your cadence

Once it is set up, you can click the link button on the Plan page! Then distribute! You can also send an invoice with the plan attached to it if people are requesting it without using the link!

[Submatic]

I realize this is an older thread but in case anyone is looking for a way to offer a subscription box where customers can make selections from your Square inventory, there isn't a direct way in Square to do that.  Submatic (my company - link here https://app.squareup.com/us/en/app-marketplace/app/submatic) is an app in the Square marketplace - we allow you to define rules and discounts for subscribers (min/max order quantity, tiered discounts, etc). Once a subscriber places an order they'll be put on whatever subscription schedule that they select and we'll notify the subscriber before their next order so that they can make updates if they'd like to do so. You can see a live example of this here.

We offer a free trial you can register at https://submatic.io/register/company if you want to test it out.