5 Ways to Turn a Basic Shopify Subscription Into a Membership People Actually Want

0:06I was going through a coffee brands Shopify store a couple weeks ago. they're a Canadian brand. They are a real business. These are cafes you walk into all across Canada, bags on grocery shelves. Let's just say a very large brand. Now on the product page, there was a toggle, a one-time purchase or subscribe and save. So I click subscribe and underneath that option, there was exactly one sentence of copy, just one. It was the legal disclaimer, the one that, you know, authorizes them to charge your card on a schedule and ends like this. Until my order is fulfilled or I cancel if permitted, if permitted.

0:42So that's the last thing a human reads before deciding whether to buy your coffee forever. Now, I am not here to pick on this brand at all. In fact, I love this brand. Their coffee is amazing. And I want to be straight with you about what I actually looked at because it does matter. I never got into their Shopify admin. I didn't see their subscriber numbers, their churn, their emails, their customer portal, or even their cancellation flow, none of it. I just looked at what a customer sees on the front end. That's all. And what I found there is the most common subscription set up on Shopify by a mile.

1:18Someone installed a subscription app, somebody switched on a 10 % subscribe and save, and then everyone waited for recurring revenue to show up. And six months later in a meeting, someone says, you know, subscriptions just aren't really working for us. Subscriptions worked fine. you installed the checkbox and you expected it to behave like a business model. So today I'm going to walk you through five places on your store. A subscription should be sold, but it probably isn't. And one of those five places you can have up and running in less than 15 minutes. You can do it before dinner tonight. I'll make sure I flag that one.

1:53OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? and it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you. And the insights are legit good. And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there.

2:24Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo and on average they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills. If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed.

3:00It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import. One app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong. And now, AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1%.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us. Links in the show notes too. Last year, I went to Commerce Roundtable in San Diego and it was so good. I'm going back again this year. It's September 21st and 22nd. And honestly, you should come to. It's the one e-commerce event that I recommend to everybody without blinking.

3:40It's not a trade show. There's no booth demos. It's really just operators on stage sharing what's actually working in their stores right now. And it's basically a room full of all founders. I was actually scrolling through my camera roll from last year and I have over 100 pictures of slides from people's talks. It's, I learned so much. It's that kind of an event. Now, I have five passes to give away for a 30 % off ticket. It's first come first serve. So if you're interested, email me jay at shopify1percent.com and I will hook you up. They will go fast. So email if you're interested. And if you're going, come say hi.

4:15Let's grab a coffee or a drink during happy hour. I'd love to meet you.

4:22so mckinsey ran a customer paid loyalty survey back in 2020 and one number from it has kind of stuck with me ever since people who join a paid loyalty program are 60 percent more likely to spend more with that brand after for a free loyalty program that number is 30 same customer same brand same flavor same product same coffee everything but the difference is whether they commit to something. And that's the argument for subscriptions in really one stat. And notice, it isn't about billing. It's about commitment. Commitment cuts both ways. And this is the part that should, it will make you feel a little bit uncomfortable.

5:01And actually, we're currently put out their 2026 state of subscriptions report, and it's a big sample. 2 ,200 merchants, 76 million in subscription revenue, 41 % of consumers say they're feeling subscription fatigue. Now that panel does lean a little bit towards digital and streaming. So treat it as a direction, not specifically a coffee benchmark, but the point a hundred percent still stands. Every, everybody's already tired of subscriptions. They have more than they can manage. They, they don't even, it's more stressful than is convenient. And a$1.70 off a big bag of coffee is just not cutting it anymore.

5:42So let's talk about from the front end where you can improve this. So place one, your navigation. So on the store I looked at, the main menu says shop, wholesale, visit a cafe and learn. First of all, there's a lot here that we can dig into because I did a full episode on how you should structure your main navigation. Every single button in your main nav needs to lead to revenue. So learn, I think could for sure be in the footer wholesale, arguably in the footer as well, too. I think things that should be on the menu that instead of wholesale and learn might be trending this month, new flavors, most popular.

6:25Like that's what people want to see. They want to come and see like what products everyone else is buying, but that's not what this episode is about. So the shop here, if you click it in the main menu, it actually goes to coffee and gift cards. It just goes to all of them. Now, the biggest problem is nowhere in that menu does the word subscribe appear or membership or club. There is a subscription collection page. It exists and it's live, but nothing links to it. So the only way a customer can find a subscription is by opening an individual product. And if they happen to scroll down and notice that there is a subscription toggle, that's it.

7:03Think about what your navigation actually is. It's not a list of pages. it's a billboard. It's telling your customer what you care about. And if your nav says cafes and recipes and never says subscribe, well, the customer's reasonable conclusion is that like you don't have a subscription program. Now compare that to, there's another brand, Trade Coffee. Subscribe is right in the main nav and you click it and you get a real page, how it works, a quiz that walks you through and matches you to the best flavor that you should subscribe to, what you get, what happens if you don't like it. and a clear next step every screen.

7:40Now, same product, coffee, but a completely different offer. So there's two things to do here. First, in your Shopify admin, go to online store, then navigation, and then to your main menu, and then add the item. Add it. It takes 90 seconds. Always have subscribe or subscriber portal in your main menu. Don't overthink the label. It could be coffee clubs, whatever. subscriptions wins almost every time because that's a word that people know and they recognize and they're probably coming there to look for it and maybe subscriptions can be a jumping off point where they can go to if they hover over it subscriber portal or subscribe or you know but it it's there now the second thing is of course you got to build the page that it points to and it's important to make it answer five questions so what do i get why is this program better than just buying it one time, how does it work?

8:36How much control do I have? And what if I change my mind? So write those five down. I'll say it again, really quick. What do I get? That has to be clear. Now, remember, we're going to get into this, but this, what you get has to be way more than just the product. That's the biggest mistake subscription brands make is they think, well, they get my product every month at 10 % off. Like what are their benefits to the get perks to the get? I mean, I'll just say it. We have a membership apps that is perfect for this. Like if you sell subscriptions, I don't care what platform you use, use our memberships app and offer VIP pricing to your members.

9:10Give them exclusive product access, give them access to different parts on your website, give them products before when you launch a new flavor before someone else. So you have to do that kind of stuff for members. Okay. So what do I get? And then why is this better than just buying it? How does it work? How much control do I have? And what if I change my mind now then link to it from your homepage, also from your footer, and then also from every product page where you're selling a subscription link to how the program works. You can put it in your welcome emails, your order confirmation, your account area, everywhere.

9:41This will become a very visited page on your website. You can't expect to convert traffic, subscription traffic, if you don't have anywhere to send them. Okay. Place number two, the actual offer. So the bag I was looking at is $17. So$1.70 a bag and on a monthly plan, that's it. That's what I get. 20, I don't know, 20 bucks a year. Don't grade my mental math, but call it roughly 20 bucks. Meanwhile, that site offers free shipping over$50 and one$17 bag doesn't clear 50. So on a one bag subscription, I'm paying shipping every single month, which means the pitch from the customer side of the screen reads something like this.

10:27Let us charge your customer every month forever, and we'll give you$1.70. That's basically what it's saying. Now, the other thing that I think is that the 10 cent is a bit light. We see some coffee brands going upwards of 25 or 30 % on their subscribe and save option, but this really varies. I think at least now you have to do 15. That is my personal opinion. It seems to be about the average on, on Amazon. And I have talked to, Amazon is an interesting case study because on Amazon, when you have your product on it, you're selling against everyone side by side. And I've had a lot of sellers tell me that if your subscribe is 10%, it doesn't move the needle at all.

11:06They have to go at least, at least 20, 25%. Most are doing 30 now. So you got to be aggressive with your subscribe and save discount. Actually, I saw a case study recently where the winning tested offer was 10 % off, 100 extra loyalty points, three free samples, plus free shipping. So it needs to be much more than just the subscribe and save. So no, I'm not going to tell you to hand over necessarily 30%, but there is a lot more that you can give your customers. So 10 % isn't the problem. 10 % as the entire offer is the problem. So build multiple layers instead money, which is the recurring discount.

11:47Sure. But also free shipping for members VIP pricing for everyone else, double loyalty points. And I'll just say it. This is a piece of cake to do with our memberships app. I would love to help you do that. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Happy to give you like guys like a extended free trial because it's really the one thing that can take any subscription program and just supercharge it. So make sure you give them control, emphasize this on the product, pick your frequency, swap products, skip, pause, cancel without emailing a human, et cetera, et cetera. Make sure you explain yourself like that does not, customers don't just know that that's true.

12:24You need to say it. Access. So give them access to things. New blends before anyone else gets them. New flavors, limited releases, seasonal things that other non-members even can't buy at all. So, and give them access to people. You know, almost nobody builds this one. And it's where, I mean, for this particular brand, they're kind of a celebrity-owned brand. I think that would be an amazing thing they could do. Like once a quarter, have a Zoom call, have coffee with the founder. So that's one that we don't often think of, but it's very powerful. And even if you're not a celebrity, that's of course totally fine.

13:01Your customers still would love to have coffee with you. So, and keep your first order offer separate from all your ongoing benefits. because those are, they do two different jobs. So 20 % off the first order plus 10 % ongoing might actually beat 15 % forever. A branded mug you can, you know, land for$8 might beat another 10 % discount and it feels like more. And now they have a mug with your logo on it and your brand every time they drink coffee. So before you pick any number, just make sure you know your gross margin, your fulfillment costs, your shipping costs, how many orders you actually get from a subscriber on average, or your lifetime value and how many cancel right after the first renewal and then choose and then test that the test test test you won't get it on the first try okay place number three and this is the five lines under your subscribe button and this is that one i mentioned in the beginning that is 15 minutes and you should really change today i mean all these you should change today but um so for this particular store when someone hovers over subscribe it showed the legal disclaimer about the subscription, but when someone hovers over subscribe or when they click the subscribe toggle, they want to see what your benefits are.

14:14Their brain kind of runs a list every time. What if I end up with too much of this? What if I can't cancel? What if I change my flavor? What if I don't want, what about when I'm away for three weeks? Can I, can I skip? How hard is it to cancel? Am I going to have to fight? And all these questions go through a customer's head when then they toggle that subscription button. And if it's not there, if you don't have what I call your objection busters, then there's a good chance you'll lose them. But unfortunately on most stores, the copy is just the legal disclaimer. And yes, sure. The disclaimer has to be there, but it can be way down below.

14:51It's not selling anything. It doesn't do you any benefit. Don't have it front and center. And by default, that's where it is on Shopify themes. And I think basically every subscription app, unless you put something in. so write five or six short lines and put them right beside the toggle and could be something like this become a member save on every delivery free shipping on all orders swap your roast anytime pause schedule or sorry pause skip cancel easy in a couple clicks early access to new releases like if i see all of that kind of stuff i'm subscribing and that's it just make them bullet points not a big paragraph definitely only bullet points you're not you don't want them to read an essay, you want them to scan.

15:31And the control part of it is not just a nice to have. So going back to that Recurly report that we talked about earlier, 38 % of consumers say they would rather pause than cancel. Three out of four subscribers who do pause come back within a few months, 75%. And merchants who put a pause option in front of the cancel button saw pause usage jump, get this, 337%. How would you like to have 337 % of your subscribers pause for a month or pause for a few months instead of canceling? So just how you arrange it makes a huge difference. So the lesson here is to make it easy to pause. And actually, hang on, that's, I would say, I would say that's actually underselling it because the lesson is if you don't even offer for a pause, you're forcing someone who needs a two week break to fire you permanently and they will never come back.

16:31And that's actually the real cost of not having a good pause flow. Most cancellation flows will do this, but a lot of, I mean, we have a great cancellation flow with bold subscriptions, but a lot of brands don't set it up. I mean, we, we do everything we can to get them to set it up and email them and user docs and everything, but they just don't take the time. So the cancellation flow is like, you know, you click to cancel and why are you canceling? It costs too much money. Would you like a discount? Or I'm going to be away. I don't need it right now. How about a pause? So make sure you set those up.

17:02They work. I can tell you that. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone's serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility, your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, et cetera, nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products, orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action.

17:54Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything, a bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store. Now, I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify1percent.com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChachiBT and Claude.

18:31And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI cloud chat GPT straight to your OmniSend account. Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.

19:05My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up.

19:39J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to OmniSend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.

20:00Okay. So place number four is what I'm calling membership, not just delivery, because the brand that I looked at has a mission statement borrowed from actually the owner has written multiple books and it's borrowed from one of the books that they're named after. And it's something about that cafe being people's parliament. Their entire physical business is built on people sitting in a room together talking. And their subscription offer is$1.70 off a bag. They're sitting on the best membership raw material I've seen in a long time, but none of it is in the offer. And if it were mine, I'd run a quarterly virtual session, half an hour, founder and head roaster on a call with the members.

20:47And here's how we built the new brand. Here's what's coming. Here's how the beans are roasted. Let's vote on the seasonal flavor this year. Ask us anything. It costs you 30 minutes a quarter, but what it buys is it buys you a subscription. nobody can price compare because no competitor can offer access to you as the founder there's only one you and the other one i'd add is a small monthly member credit which is a use it or lose it credit this we see this work like crazy it's different than a discount if someone emails you and says hey this month 20 off you think well i have to spend money to get it but if i email you and I say, we added a$20 credit to your account.

21:28Just log in and use it. It's available in any order over$100 or whatever. You feel like it's a credit in your account that you have to use. And yes, this is a piece of cake to do with our memberships app. I did not mean for this to turn into that, but going through the site, it's just, there's so many things that member benefits truly, truly solves. I have seen brands test offering credit rather than a discount. And the difference is staggering on the results. Like it is night and day when you offer a credit and it is so easy to do, but there's something different about saying there's$20 in your account, log in and use it, expires at the end of this month versus getting an email, like save 10 % this month.

22:14McKenzie actually has a version of this in their loyalty research that we talked about earlier, but members who actually redeem something spend 25 % more than members who signed up and never, and never used a benefit. So getting a member to redeem something like log in and use it will increase what they spend by 25%. So the, the, the membership enrollment is not even the big goal here. I mean, yes, it's great to have someone as a subscriber, but if they truly are part of a membership program that they're using, they're redeeming, they spend more overall as well. So, and on top of it, if you have retail locations, this just gets better real fast, which it would for this brand because online subscribers could get a small cafe credit when they walk in, scan the member QR code and they get a, they get a free drink or they get access to something.

23:13They get to try a drink that they've never ordered before. A member who buys a bag at the counter on the way out gets a discount because they're also a member. So one benefit connects online and offline. And actually there's a super interesting data point. And this was, I was at Shopify conference last week that customers who shop on your store and, and on offline to retail are three times more valuable than a customer who only shops on one channel. So if you can get a customer to buy online and then also buy in your store, they are three times more valuable. So like do everything you can to connect the benefits between the two.

23:51And then the bottom line is these great customers that you're creating, these ones that are, are, are deeply connected to you that show up on those quarterly calls with the founder that are shopping online, offline with your member benefits. Those are the ones that tell everybody else about else about your brand. And that's how the best brands right now are genuinely growing. Find your best few hundred customers, look after them properly, teach them new things, make them feel like they belong, and then let them go find more. Okay. Now place number five is everywhere after they said no. So what I mean by this is someone sees your toggle, they pick one time purchase.

24:32Okay. And they go to add to cart. Now most stores treat that as the final answer, but I am here to tell you It is not. And we know this from data because we see the percentage of people that accept offers for a subscription long past the product page after they have added it to the cart as a one time. Don't assume that they thought deeply about should I subscribe? Should I not subscribe? And once they decided not subscribe, the fact is most people come to a product page and they just quickly click add to cart without really thinking about it. They maybe didn't deeply understand the offer. They didn't reject subscriptions.

25:07they probably just, they didn't, maybe didn't even toggle it onto subscriptions. So they didn't see all of your benefits or they want to taste the coffee before committing to it monthly. So they were on their phone waiting in a lineup at an airport and just quickly ordered it. So keep offering it politely and in the places where it makes sense. So in the cart with an easy switch to a subscription line with whatever your strongest benefit is, you know, you don't want to clutter up the cart, but switch to a subscription and enjoy 10 % VIP pricing forever. Or as long as you're subscribed. If you're on Shopify plus, you can of course also offer them a subscription upgrade in the checkout, but another great place is actually in the post-purchase email timed when they might actually be running out.

25:50So time it for, if it's coffee, you know, 20 to 30 days after that subscription goes out or sorry, the first order goes out, say, enjoyed the coffee, make your next one 10 % less and enjoy VIP pricing and a quarterly Zoom call with our founder on a subscription. And then the one that I think is super strong, but almost every brand doesn't do. And I buy a lot of products and I don't, I rarely ever see this, but after a customer has ordered a product twice, you suggest the subscription. The majority of your customers are actually going to order like on average, if you like, I can't speak for every coffee store, but I'm going to assume, uh, this coffee brand about 80 % of their customers buy it once and then just keep buying it and around 20 % commit to a subscription.