How Does a Recharge Migration Power Subscription Growth?

Subscription ecommerce has grown exponentially in recent years, with more and more consumers embracing the convenience and value of recurring purchases. This presents a huge opportunity for retailers to tap into a loyal customer base and predictable revenue streams.

However, to succeed with subscriptions, it’s crucial you choose a platform that can support your business as it scales.

For many brands, the decision to migrate to a new subscription platform is driven by the limitations of their current technology. Legacy systems or custom-built platforms can be inflexible, unable to adapt to changing customer needs and market trends.

Migrating to a modern, purpose-built subscription platform can unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation. With a more flexible and scalable solution, brands can experiment with new subscription models, pricing strategies and customer experiences.

Whilst the specific subscription platform you choose will ultimately depend on your business’ unique requirements and goals, this article will explore the benefits of migrating to Recharge in particular.

What is Recharge?

Recharge is a leading subscription management platform that empowers ecommerce brands to build and grow their recurring revenue. It’s a popular and reliable platform, trusted by thousands of global brands to power smarter subscription experiences.

The solution is a particularly strong fit for brands selling consumables in the health and wellness, food and beverage, beauty and personal care, home, pet, and baby sectors.

The platform excels at giving you full control over subscription programs, with the chance to adapt your customer experience as your strategy evolves. With dynamic bundles, gifting and no code/low code customisation, Recharge gives you the freedom to experiment with different subscription models, pricing structures and customer experiences to find a solution that works for you.

Why migrate to Recharge’s subscription platform?

By investing in a platform like Recharge, with a large and advanced suite of features, you can avoid the need to switch products every few years, developing a strong foundation for your subscription strategy. Outlined below are some of the features and tools that facilitate this.

A flexible and scalable subscription solution

Many subscription management tools, whether custom-built solutions, legacy systems, or other Shopify Apps, often struggle to keep pace with the growth and evolving needs of ecommerce brands. As your subscriber base expands and your offerings become more complex, these platforms may lack the flexibility and scalability required to support your business.

Migrating to a new platform becomes necessary to overcome these constraints, but it’s crucial to choose a tool that can grow with you for the long term. Recharge is designed to do exactly this and the platform’s scalability is largely thanks to its robust, flexible and documented API.

With this API you can:

• fully customise how subscriptions operate on your store;
• develop a custom product page and checkout experience;
• create custom cancellation flows to reduce churn; and
• rebuild your entire customer portal, adding new functionality specific to your industry.

Headless and composable integration

Additionally, Recharge’s API allows you to integrate with Hydrogen, Shopify’s React-based framework, opening up the opportunity to explore headless and composable commerce without migrating subscription platforms.

Whilst composable commerce isn’t necessarily the right option for every brand (take a look at our article comparing Shopify themes vs headless to learn more), knowing that your subscription platform can comfortably operate within a composable stack is reassuring for many CTOs.

Access Recharge’s revenue tools

Recharge’s functionality extends beyond just core subscription management, offering two advanced revenue tools: Retain and Grow. These are designed to support revenue growth at multiple touchpoints in the customer journey.

The Retain product offering is designed to help to keep acquired customers engaged with your subscription plan. Through data analysis you can learn when and why customers churn and then build a retention strategy that incentivises them to stay subscribed.

This suite of tools includes:

• Rewards
• Cancellation Prevention
• Failed Payment Recovery
• Win Backs
• Referrals (coming soon)

Alongside Retain, the Grow package is soon to be released and will provide a suite of tools developed to maximise your store’s Average Order Value (AOV). With this tool you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate growth strategies into the customer journey. For example, you can showcase personalised product recommendations and strategic cross-sell offers at checkout, in-cart and post-purchase – all key user touchpoints.

Supports brand internationalisation

Another key aspect of Recharge’s scalability is its strong integration with Shopify Markets. By combining these two platforms, you can easily manage subscriptions across multiple regions, languages and currencies.

Moreover, you can localise your subscription offerings, pricing, and communications to better serve customers in different regions.

Integrates seamlessly with your tech stack

Utilising Recharge allows you to leverage a large network of tech and agency partners to connect all areas of your business and perfect your subscription lifecycle. Recharge integrates with numerous ecommerce technologies through pre-existing APIs, including leading solutions such as Klaviyo, Gorgias, LoyaltyLion and Okendo.

These integrations allow you to:

1. extend the functionality of your subscription program;
2. enable more complete data analysis; and
3. create a more comprehensive experience for customers.

Where out-of-the-box integrations aren’t yet available, utilising Patchworks to create custom solutions ensures you benefit from Recharge regardless of your existing tech stack.

Features a user-friendly interface

Recharge is designed with usability in mind, providing an intuitive interface for managing your subscriptions and customers. Unlike some competing platforms that are known for clunky UX, Recharge makes it easy for your team to navigate the platform and access the information they need.

When a platform is simple to use it enables ecommerce teams to spend more leveraging that tool to its full capacity. This increased efficiency allows you to iterate and improve your subscription strategy more quickly, leading to faster growth.

Additionally, a seamless user experience on the backend often translates to a better experience for your customers, as your team can more effectively manage subscriptions, resolve issues, and communicate with subscribers.

By choosing a platform like Recharge with a strong focus on usability, you set your subscription program up for long-term success and scalability.

Enhanced customer experience

In addition to an intuitive backend UI/UX, Recharge provides an easy-to-navigate subscription experience for customers.

Building trust is vital for ecommerce success, hence why subscription management must be straightforward for users. This isn’t always the case with subscription platforms, but Recharge’s customer portal allows customers to control their own subscriptions.

With a sophisticated subscription platform like Recharge, users can:

• add one-time purchases to a recurring order;
• swap products;
• gift subscriptions;
• edit delivery frequency; and
• edit their address or payment information.

Detailed data and insights

A key benefit of Recharge is the wealth of data it provides on your subscription program. The platform offers a unified view of all key metrics, including subscription sales and revenue, customer retention, and product performance. Retailers can easily identify their most valuable customers to learn from their behaviours, as well as analyse churn to spotlight high drop-off points.

With detailed analytics and reporting compiled into intuitive dashboards, you can gain a deep understanding of your subscribers, as well as identify trends and opportunities.

Armed with this information, ecommerce teams can make data-driven decisions at speed to refine your strategy and accelerate the growth of this revenue stream.

Built-in A/B testing

Recharge comes with built-in A/B testing capabilities built-in, allowing you to experiment with different subscription offers, pricing models, and retention strategies. By continuously testing and iterating, you can optimise your program for maximum performance and customer satisfaction.

How Swanky supports a successful Recharge migration

Migrating your subscription program to a new platform may seem daunting, but with the right approach, it can be a smooth and successful process. At Swanky, we’ve helped numerous businesses migrate to Recharge, including the likes of international personal grooming retailer Wilkinson Sword and Australian coffee brand Montville Coffee.

Over time, we’ve developed a proven process to optimise the transition. Our team works closely with you to understand your unique requirements and develop a tailored migration plan. We handle all the technical aspects of the migration, ensuring that your customer and subscription data is accurately transferred to Recharge.

Learn more about what a successful Shopify subscription migration looks like with our team of ecommerce experts. Our article explores the main stages of the subscription migration process, common challenges when migrating subscription data, and the steps Swanky takes to mitigate risk when clients change subscription platforms.

Migrate to Recharge

With its flexible, scalable and user-friendly solution, Recharge empowers you to build a thriving subscription program that delights your customers and drives long-term growth.

To learn more about how Recharge can meet your requirements, and to discuss your migration options, chat with Swanky’s subscription specialists today.