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We make LOCAL online shopping EASY!
ThrivingLocally is a marketplace dedicated to supporting and growing Canada’s local small and micro businesses through online shopping of their products, services, food, events, and activities.
Selling recurring subscriptions online
10 Second Summary…
What is a Subscription?
Rather than making a one-time purchase, a subscription offers your customers the opportunity to buy your products or services on a recurring basis. You can offer them weekly, monthly, or whatever frequency works best for you and your customers and best of all the webstore does all the recurring billing automatically!
The ThrivingLocally Advantage
No additional fees! – This is a standard included with the webstore
Automated – customer is charged based on the defined payment schedule you setup
Flexible – you can define daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, end dates (for payment plans), sign up fee.
Great for selling what?
Product Subscriptions – Sock of the Club, Local offerings box, E-books
Memberships – Monthly or yearly Fees, e-books
Donations – for charities
The full story…
A prime example of a subscription success is the Dollar Shave Club. They sell no-fuss razors, delivered to your door every month for only $1.00. No really, only $1! And this straightforward business model, combined with a viral marketing campaign, led to Dollar Shave Club being a huge success!
Is a subscription model right for me?
Razors are something that people purchase all the time, so it makes sense to sell them on a recurring basis BUT even if your business sells something that doesn’t typically get purchased repetitively, that doesn’t mean your store can’t offer subscriptions. You just have to be creative!
If you can make it work: why not do it!
Memberships to a gym or a club are a no-brainer for automatic subscriptions but so are products that people purchase frequently such a consumables (think clothing, food, industry tips), but if you’re not sure on ideas check out what we have listed below:
Clothing: Send your customers a surprise piece of clothing based on their preferences every month, such as a sock of the month club, or underwear of the month… you get the idea.
Food: Start a subscription box filled with certain types of themed food box, such as healthy snack foods, unique candy, local foods that you send out at the start of each new season.
Digital products: Send a weekly photo, e-book, joke of the week centered around certain topic. Digital products can be cheap to make and distribute so you can offer them at an economical rate = more volume!
Services: You could charge a monthly fee for all kinds of services such as coaching, massage, eye lashes, or hair cutting. A typical enticement to a customer deciding to purchase a recurring subscription is that they get a better deal than if they were to purchase individually.
Now a subscription won’t work for everything for example of you are selling electronics, your customers probably won’t need a new TV or Xbox every month. Same goes for furniture. But if you think creatively you will be able to find ways boost sales by offering subscriptions through your online store.
Want to see how it is done?
If you want to see exactly how to set up a subscription or payment plan listing in a ThrivingLocally webstore then see our vendor help page for Subscriptions.
Looking to start a business or add eCommerce to your business?
Open a webstore for FREE on the ThrivingLocally marketplace! Designed with all the features that a local small and micro business needs PLUS we made it EASY!
Go to this link for more information and to sign up