Imagine a world where you only have to sell your product once but each month, you have consistent revenue. This world could be your reality if you think about implementing a Shopify subscription service to your store.

A subscription model works best when you sell products that people already buy often. In most cases, you’ll offer the subscription plan at a discount than if they were to manually buy the individual products each week or month themselves.

For example, you would probably struggle to sell a TV subscription simply because people tend to keep their televisions for a long time. It’s not a recurring purchase most people make often.

Benefits of a subscription

#1 The main benefit of running a subscription service is the recurring revenue you receive.

Think about it. Imagine you spend $1000 marketing your business. In a traditional sense, if your products are worth $100 each, you need to use your marketing spend to attract 10 people to your store to buy from you.

If you manage to do that in one month, you’ll have generated $1000 in revenue. But the issue, then, is you have the spend the same marketing budget the following month in order to do it again.

What if, for example, you used the same $1000 marketing spend, but instead of people making a one-time purchase and not coming back to buy again, they signed up to purchase your products automatically for the next 6 months.

In this case, you’ve spent $1000 on your marketing but gained $600 from your 10 customers.

This gives you more money to play with.

#2 The second benefit of operating a subscription service is the increased customer lifetime value.

If someone purchases from you once and spends $100, that customer is worth $100 to your business.

However, if a customer consistently buys from you every single month, (at $100) that customer, after 6 months, is now worth $600.

And the greatest thing about it, as long as you continue to provide a good service for those subscribed to your product line, there’s a high chance you’ll have a lifelong customer.

Shopify apps for your subscription store

The best thing about Shopify is the array of plug-and-play apps you can use to boost the performance of your store.

One Shopify subscription app to consider is the Bold Subscription app.

Shopify subscription

Bold allows you to sell your products as a subscription and offers a suite of tools that allow you to analyze the effectiveness of your subscription service.

You can see how many customers you generate per day, as well as the lifetime revenue of these customers.

When your customers subscribe to a product in your store, they are taken to a special recurring checkout that captures their payment information for that subscription. To do this, we need a payment gateway to store that information safely and securely.

However, many merchants find it difficult to set up payment gateways with the Bold subscription app. Hence right below we’ve set up a complete guide to walking you through the steps of setting up the payment gateway with the Bold subscription app.

Let’s get started:

  1. From Shopify's admin, select Apps.

    shopify admin

  2. Select Recurring Orders & Subscriptions by Bold.

    order and subscription

  3. Select Settings, then Payment Gateway. Settings
  4. Navigate to one of the Supported Payment Gateways and set up an account.

    Note: Stripe and BrainTree are our recommended gateways. They are the ones that have been tested most extensively with Subscriptions.

    Payment Gateway
  5. Back in the app select Connect to Stripe (as an option).

    Note: Steps will vary depending on the selected gateway.

    Stripe
  6. Select Sign in with Stripe to connect. sign in Stripe to connect
  7. Enter the email address, password, and select Sign in to your account. Sign in
  8. Verify and update the Stripe account information. update info
  9. Select Authorize access to this account. Authorize access

That's it! At this point, we highly recommend processing a test subscription with a real credit card to ensure everything has been set up correctly.

In any case, if you’re unable to do it, our experts will do it for you. Simply, purchase the Bold Subscription service from our task catalog, provide access to your stores & our experts will set it up for you in no time!