Last year, we partnered with Shopify to build a new version of our subscriptions app that directly uses Shopify Checkout. Shopify Checkout is natively integrated with Shopify Payments and allows for faster checkout, is optimized for mobile shopping, and natively integrates with more localized payment options. The result is a more unified admin experience, allowing you to offer a single Shopify checkout experience for your buyers’ one-time and subscription purchases. 

Any new Shopify stores interested in installing Recharge on or after November 2nd 2020 can install the integration through the Recharge App listing and existing merchants can migrate over. We’ve been partnering closely with Shopify to ensure the best user experience for our merchants. The majority of our merchants on the Shopify platform, almost 15 thousand of them, are using this unified checkout experience and our app has over 500, 5 star reviews to date.

A unified checkout experience

Having a unified checkout experience can make it easier for merchants to focus on their core business. The Recharge app can be set up and managed directly in the Shopify Admin, so there’s no longer a need to navigate two separate apps for back-office tasks like refund management. This makes it easier to track orders and to run marketing campaigns. There’s also no longer a need to duplicate discount codes or product catalogs. Additionally, Shopify’s feature releases will automatically be compatible with your app, so your buyers will always benefit from the latest Shopify has to offer. 

Migrating to the Shopify checkout

Our product and engineering teams worked hard to make migrating a painless experience. Most migrations have been completed in under 20 minutes. There are some things to consider before choosing to migrate to the Shopify unified checkout. To ensure your store is a good candidate for migration, make sure your business is compatible: 

• Approved payment gateway – Shopify Payments, Authorize.net, Stripe (which is only available to some merchants) or PayPal Express.
• Accelerated payment options and wallets – Klarna, mollie iDEAL and Sofort are currently unavailable for subscription merchants
• In-person delivery zones – Pick up in store and local delivery are not available.
• Multi-currency – Shopify’s multi-currency feature will not be available at launch.
• Your most used integrations: Tax, post-purchase upsell apps, loyalty, dunning and more coming. 

We’re working hard to ensure the best experience with the most robust functionality to our Shopify Checkout. Included in that journey are both feature compatibility with the Recharge checkout you’re already using, and adding more integrations that help you grow lifetime value and prevent churn. In the meantime, we’d like to be transparent about what’s currently available. To make it easier, we have a feature compatibility article up to date as we continue to add functionality and integrations. 

Want to learn more? Recharge and Shopify Checkout FAQ

For merchants interested in migrating over, fill out this form and someone from Recharge will be in touch with you.

The post Integrating Recharge and Shopify Checkout appeared first on Recharge.

What is the Technology Partnerships Program?

Recharge is a product driven company and our Technology Partnerships Program is no exception. This program is rooted in the commitment to building and partnering with the applications our merchants need to do their jobs. The integrations directory features integration tiles that describe what the integration is, why using it with Recharge will benefit your business, and provides links to clear documentation on how to get started and where to go if you need help. Many integrations can be installed in just a few short clicks so you can focus on growing your business.

So, what applications go best with your Recharge account? 

Over 70% of our merchants use one or more of our Recharge Select partners listed on our tech partner page. Each of our Select partners has a dedicated landing page where you can learn more about the benefits of using the integration with Recharge, view documentation on how to get started, and see a few examples of who’s using the integration in their recharge app.  

With the creation of this new program, we now have a dedicated team of technology partnerships managers and a tech partner product support team. They’re product obsessed and driven to ensure our tech partners have all the tools and support they need to build an integration into Recharge. 

“From day one, we’ve seen how critical it is to ensure that our merchants are able to integrate Recharge with other products in their tech stack. With this program, we’ve made it easy for any technology vendor in the ecosystem to build on our APIs and solve for new use cases,” said Ruoting Sun, Vice President of Technology Partnerships at Recharge.

Thank you, tech partners!

We’d like to thank all of our technology partners for joining us on our mission to empower our merchants to grow their business. Each of our tech partners provides merchants with an important tool that supports their businesses. We appreciate the time you’ve taken to build and document the integration, and the prioritization of a Recharge integration on your roadmap. Most importantly, we’re grateful for the relationships we’re building and the personal connections our team is making in the industry. It’s a pleasure to share this journey with you.

For applications interested in officially becoming a Recharge technology partner, please complete the “become a partner” form on our tech partner landing page, and someone from our team will help you get started. 

The post Announcing the Recharge Technology Partnerships Program appeared first on Recharge.

The “new” essential items

The definition of essential goods shifted to include categories that were previously less steady, as new product demand emerged. This included everything from face masks to cleaning supplies to work-from-home and homeschooling equipment.

Yoga pants and sweatshirts took the place of standard office wardrobes. Parents traded in their museum and zoo memberships for subscription boxes with books, toys, and art supplies—anything to keep their kids entertained at home. And let’s not forget those lucky enough to have snagged a toilet paper subscription!

2020’s lockdowns amped up subscription sales

This shift in spend catapulted the subscription ecommerce market to new heights. According to the Subscription Economy Index, subscription brands outpaced their product-based peers in 2020 with subscription sales up 12%.

In this year’s State of Subscription Commerce Report, we found that in studying Recharge merchants in 2020, subscribers grew 91%, and Average Order Value (AOV) was up across the majority of verticals.

Subscriptions are here to stay

As lockdowns begin to lift and more venues and activities reopen, there will be a new impact on online expenditures, but some things are here to stay. 

• Convenience – Convenience (and safety) became a luxury during the pandemic. Consumers used to be able to pop into the grocery store when they were out of  dish soap, but long lines and empty store aisles made them pivot this spend online. Subscriptions to basic household consumables like coffee and personal care products soared, and they are likely here to stay for two reasons. 
• Community – In traditional shopping experiences, customers often wait for sales to stock up on products. Alternatively, with subscription and loyalty programs, every day becomes a “sale day.” Customers are incentivized to keep up their subscriptions because of discounts available to them, igniting the feeling that they’re getting good value for their spend. Subscribers are also able to buy from the brands they love versus settling for whatever happens to be on the shelf that day. And as brands continue to offer more products and upsell/cross-sell opportunities, the loyalty increases for customers who are wanting to try something new from stores they already love.
• Time – Time is the most valuable asset to most people. With restaurants reopening and COVID-19 vaccinations on the rise, the world is slowly starting to return to some semblance of normal. People are antsy to travel and spend time on experiences that they have missed out on for more than a year. If they can save time on shopping for essentials by leaning on subscription brands to replenish their stock, it allows them to capitalize on their newfound free time to make up for lost time.

How merchants should continue to support customers

In order to capitalize on these opportunities, merchants should lean into building brand loyalty—focusing on the customer experience and building a brand community. Internally, merchants should consider how to build their recurring revenue, increasing AOV and LTV.

Some merchants have done this by creating membership programs. These programs allow for exclusive access to discounts, first access to new products, and most importantly, steady engagement and communication with their customers.

The paradigm shift is recognizing that the transactional approach to sales is outdated now that relational commerce is showing the value of building long-lasting (and AOV-boosting) relationships between brands and their consumers.

When merchants use multiple touch points for communication, like Klaviyo together with Recharge, they can trigger targeted marketing messages based on the consumer’s recurring purchase activity, which are shown to both drive higher engagement and increase average order values across the board.

Discover more ways to improve customer retention and loyalty throughout 2021 and beyond with Klaviyo.

The post How the lockdowns affected consumers appeared first on Recharge.

Here at Recharge, we know that your subscription business keeps you busy — and that there can be quite a bit of complexity around your day-to-day operations.
That’s why we’re excited to share five different ways you can use Recharge and Zapier to simplify everything from email marketing to invoicing — and beyond.
By creating “zaps” (links between two services you’ve connected on Zapier), you can benefit from action-triggered automations that make some of your most important processes more efficient and scalable.
Let’s dive in and look at five different zaps you can create today and some use cases to go along with them.

1. Email marketing

Take the legwork out of important customer communications by using Zapier to integrate Recharge and your email marketing software. Using a Recharge event as a trigger, you can automate emails that send at key moments in the customer journey, like when a new customer signs up for a subscription, when a subscription is re-activated, or upon a cancellation.
Major email service providers like MailChimp, Drip, and Klaviyo all integrate with Recharge via Zapier, so let’s look at these in a bit more detail and in the context of these three different email platforms.
When a subscription is cancelled (Mailchimp example)
A big part of your retention efforts hinge on following up with customers who have unsubscribed. By triggering an email that sends upon a Recharge action (like ‘cancelled subscription) you can automatically follow up via email with a coupon code that encourages the customer to come back.
Example: A customer cancels their subscription in Recharge (trigger: Cancelled Subscription) and receives an e-mail with a coupon code to come back in Mailchimp (action: send campaign)

When a subscription is re-activated (Drip example)
Welcome back your re-activated subscribers at the exact moment they re-up their subscription with you using a re-activation trigger in Recharge (like ‘new reactivated subscription’) as the signal (adding a specific tag) to your email tool to fire off that automated greeting email.
Example: (trigger: New Reactivated Subscription) A customer reactivates a subscription and gets a tag added in Drip titled “Recovery Campaign — Success” in Drip (action: add tag to subscriber)
When a new customer subscribes (Klaviyo example)
You want to capitalize on the forward momentum of a new subscription — and email is an easy way to do that. By setting up an automated email that’s triggered to send upon specific actions (like ‘new customer’ and ‘add subscriber to a form’) you can be sure that each new subscriber is welcomed with the right message at the right time.

2. Invoicing

Zapier + Recharge integration with tools like Quickbooks, Freshbooks, and Saasu make it easy to trigger an action around invoicing tasks — like generating an invoice for a new subscription, sending a receipt when a new subscription order is paid for, and even for automatically setting up new clients in your invoicing software when a new customer comes on board. Let’s see what this looks like in action.
Generating an invoice for new subscriptions (Saasu example)
Rather than manually creating an invoice for each new subscription you get, you can use Zapier to integrate Recharge and your invoicing tool (like Saasu) to automate this important task.

Generating receipt for payment of an existing subscription (QuickBooks example)
Every time a subscriber’s payment clears for their subscription, you’ll need to send a receipt. Automation makes this a hands-off task. By setting up a zap, you can generate a new sales receipt any time the given customer action is completed. Note: Only Zapier premium users can access QuickBooks zaps.
Example: A new order for an existing subscription is processed and submitted to Shopify by Recharge (trigger: New Order) and generates a new sales receipt in Quickbooks for the given customer (action: Create Sales Receipt)
Creating a new client in invoicing software (FreshBooks example)
Each new lead needs to be entered as a new client in your invoicing software — but doing that manually would be an extremely time-consuming task. Instead, use a zap to automatically set up new clients in your invoicing software (like FreshBooks) with a ‘new customer’ trigger.
Example: A new lead purchases a new subscription in Recharge (trigger: New Customer) and creates a new client in Freshbooks (action: Create Client)

3. Shipping & logistics

Zaps can also be leveraged to simplify your shipping and logistics processes, too. By using a Recharge event to trigger a shipping or logistics app to take an action, you can automate an action like generating a new order for fulfillment within your shipping tool, for example.
Creating a new order for fulfillment (ShipStation example)
Using the Recharge ‘New Order’ trigger, you can build a zap that automatically creates a new order from an existing subscription when it is both processed and submitted to Shopify. From there, this could then generate a new order for fulfillment within your shipping tool (like ShipStation) with the ‘Create Order’ action.

Creating a new pickup or dropoff task (OnFleet example)
You can also use Recharge ‘New Order’ triggers to automatically generate a new pickup or dropoff task in your logistics tool, like OnFleet. Again, this saves you the time of having to do this manually each time a new order is submitted.
Example: A customer purchases a new subscription and generates their first order in Recharge (trigger: New Order) and generates a new pickup or dropoff task in Onfleet (action: Create Task)

4. Support

Create zaps that simplify the support process both for you and for your subscribers by leveraging Recharge events as triggers for your support applications, like ZenDesk or HelpScout.
Launch a support ticket upon subscription cancellation (Zendesk example)
If you use Zendesk, you can follow up with customers who have churned by triggering an updated support ticket status when a customer cancels their subscription in Recharge. Note: This feature is only available to Premium Zapier users.

Update customer in your support software with new subscription purchase (HelpScout example)
Rather than having to manually update your support software each day with your updated customer list, you can use Zapier to integrate your CRM and support software, like HelpScout, for example. In doing so, you can be sure that when a new or existing customer purchases a new subscription in Recharge, their profile will automatically be updated or created.
Example: A customer purchases a new subscription in Recharge (trigger: new customer) and is searched for in Helpscout to see if user exists (search: Find Customer). If they didn’t already exist, a new customer is created (action: Create Customer)

5. Notifications

You can also use Zaps to create communication notifications based around customer behaviors, like when a customer cancels and re-activates a subscription. This helps ensure your team is staying on top of those important moments for customer interaction — even beyond your automated messages.
Notify a Slack channel of important customer actions
If a customer cancels their subscription, that’s a moment in which you want to reconnect with your customer and see if you can win him or her back. Using a Recharge trigger, you can get updates within your #DontLeaveUs Slack channel any time this action is completed so you can work on reducing churn.

Send a text to welcome back customers
If you use a text messaging platform like FireText, you can trigger welcome texts that send when a customer reactivates a previously cancelled subscription. Doing so is a nice way to capitalize on the forward momentum of this action — and it’s a personalization tactic customers can appreciate.
Example: A customer reactivates their previously cancelled subscription (action: New Re-Activated Subscription) and receives a welcome back text message from FireText (action: Send Message)
Wrap Up
September 2018 update: Recharge is live on Zapier, time to be more productive! Use any of the above mentioned zaps or experiment with Recharge and other apps to create your own time-saving zaps – the possibilities are endless.
We want to hear from you: What are your favorite Zapier integrations? What are some zaps you see yourself creating with Recharge?

The post 5 Zapier integrations to simplify your subscription business appeared first on Recharge.