Why Subscription Brands Migrate to Shopify & Recharge

Explosive growth in the global subscription ecommerce market is being driven by several factors. Advances in technology, improved logistics and the rise of mobile commerce have made it easier than ever for brands to deliver tailored recurring value – whilst consumers increasingly seek out flexible, low-effort ways to access the products they love.

As the market matures, competition increases and consumer expectations continue to rise, the pressure to remain agile and satisfy customers – all whilst maintaining profitability – intensifies.

For many subscription brands, legacy and custom ecommerce infrastructures have become bottlenecks, eroding profitability, hampering agility, and negatively impacting the customer experience.

To keep up with market and consumer demands, brands need a modern, flexible and scalable commerce architecture – one that empowers them to move fast, maximise revenue and deliver seamless subscriber experiences. Ultimately, choosing the right subscription ecommerce tooling isn’t just an IT decision – it’s a growth strategy.

In this article, we explore how your outdated infrastructure might be costing you growth – and why an increasing number of subscription leaders are choosing Shopify and Recharge as the modern alternative for scalable subscription commerce.

Common (and costly) pain points of legacy & custom infrastructure

Lack of agility

If completing even basic tasks – like adding new products, launching new bundles or tweaking your subscription logic – requires dedicated developer time, complex QA processes and long deployment cycles, this could be costing you time, money and opportunity.

Being able to rapidly respond to retail trends, customer feedback and seasonal demand is essential for capitalising on key revenue windows. Legacy and custom platforms often make this difficult for subscription brands because of their complex architecture, clunky code and cumbersome interfaces.

Mounting technical debt

Maintenance on platforms like Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and custom builds can quickly become a drain on resources, diverting attention and budget away from growth-driving strategies.

If you’re spending more time and money dealing with security patches, version upgrades and technical firefighting, than implementing strategic initiatives and optimising subscriber experience, growth will soon stall.

Clunky subscription UX

Today’s subscribers want to be in control. They expect flexibility and convenience at their fingertips, with the ability to easily pause, skip or edit their subscription themselves.

Many legacy and custom platforms require custom workarounds to support this, which can lead to a clunky user experience that frustrates shoppers, increases churn and reduces customer lifetime value.

This can also increase the load on customer support teams and damage your brand’s reputation over time if issues aren’t addressed.

Integration inefficiencies

Do you depend on complex custom integrations to connect your ecommerce store with subscription software? Not only is building and maintaining these connections resource-intensive, this can often result in data silos, operational inefficiencies, ecosystem fragility, and difficulty scaling – all things that create risk and stifle growth.

Lack of data visibility

Understanding how subscribers behave, when subscription churn happens, and what drives retention is key for making smart, data-driven decisions and unlocking growth. On many legacy and custom commerce platforms, real-time data and insights are buried behind limited reporting functionality or disconnected tools.

Shopify & Recharge: The go-to subscription commerce stack

In 2024 alone, $500M in GMV was migrated to Recharge and Shopify, with global subscription brands like Dermalogica, Vital Proteins, Kylie Cosmetics and Who Gives a Crap all pairing these two solutions to create an agile, scalable foundation for long-term success.

At Swanky, we’ve helped retailers including daysoftⓇ, FutureYou Cambridge and FFS successfully migrate to Shopify and Recharge – driving fantastic results for these brands and their customers.

Here are some of the reasons why this combination is such a compelling option for subscription brands today.

Faster time to market

With intuitive user interfaces and no/low-code approaches, Shopify and Recharge both significantly reduce reliance on developers, empowering ecommerce teams to implement changes themselves. It is much quicker and easier to launch new products, pages and offers, and to test and optimise the customer journey, without being bottlenecked by development cycles.

The ability to move fast and remain agile is a major strategic advantage in the competitive DTC subscription landscape.

Lower cost of ownership

Unlike legacy platforms that incur bloated development fees, Shopify and Recharge offer a leaner total cost of ownership (TCO) – freeing up capital for growth-driving initiatives. For example, budget can be directed towards strategies that focus on conversion rate optimisation, customer lifetime value and churn reduction, rather than paying developers for website maintenance and basic edits.

Read more about how Shopify’s TCO compares to that of Adobe Commerce.

Powerful native subscription capabilities

Recharge offers advanced subscription features out-of-the-box, empowering retailers to build buyer routines that last. The platform’s powerful native functionality includes:

• Easy subscription management – Subscribers can pause, skip, swap or reschedule deliveries from within a self-serve customer portal. Giving customers control is a powerful strategy for increasing average order value and lifetime value.

• Dynamic bundles – This functionality empowers customers to create personalised product bundles, or let them choose from pre-configured bundles based on seasonality or bestsellers.

• Gifting – Recharge allows subscriptions to be gifted, with tools to convert recipients into long-term customers.

• Growth tools – This powerful functionality is designed to help brands gain more subscribers and bigger orders. It includes checkout incentives, post-purchase offers and upcoming order add-ons.

• Retention suite – These tools help retailers drive retention, including solutions for passive churn prevention, rewards, cancellation reduction and win-back campaigns.

• Customer intelligence – Recharge provides access to unified data dashboards that allow you to develop actionable insights and make smarter strategic decisions.

This functionality helps to reduce churn, increase subscription retention and drive growth – without requiring custom development.

Composable ecosystem

A key benefit of Shopify is its app ecosystem, allowing retailers to integrate best-in-class tools to help deliver unified, personalised subscriber experiences. Brands can connect all areas of their business, perfecting the entire subscription lifecycle.

Shopify retailers have access to over 8,000 rigorously-tested apps, many of which are developed specifically for Shopify.

Additionally, Recharge offers over 100 prebuilt integrations to extend brands’ capabilities, including connections with email and SMS tools, loyalty platforms, logistics solutions and fraud prevention software.

Being able to easily adopt new tools like this gives retailers the agility needed for growth in the subscription sector.

Actionable insights at your fingertips

Both Shopify and Recharge offer out-of-the-box analytics and dashboards, giving your team the insights they need without data engineering resources.

This allows ecommerce teams to get a reliable and unified view of key metrics, track performance over time, and ultimately understand exactly what will drive their business forward.

Case study: Migrating to Shopify & Recharge drives digital transformation for daysoftⓇ

When the team at leading DTC contact lens brand daysoftⓇ first engaged Swanky, they were experiencing a number of pain points on their legacy custom-built ecommerce solution.

Growing demand across international markets was putting increasing pressure on their site, with limited options to scale. Meanwhile, it was proving challenging to integrate with third-party apps, and a large number of tasks had to be completed manually. It was also difficult to access data and insights.

Swanky migrated the brand’s ecommerce store to Shopify Plus, implementing Recharge for subscription management. Replatforming helped overcome the growth blockers daysoftⓇ was experiencing, providing a reliable, scalable foundation for the brand’s subscription model.

In particular:

• Shopify’s internationalisation functionality provided options for scaling cross-border.

• Having access to a mature ecosystem of rigorously-tested third-party apps has allowed the team to easily extend the capabilities of the daysoftⓇ site.

• Automation within Shopify and Recharge’s platforms has reduced the amount of manual admin required, allowing more time to be funnelled into growth strategies.

• The team were able to easily access data and insights, presented in a clear and intuitive format.

You can read more about this migration in our case study about daysoftⓇ’s digital transformation.

Migrate to Shopify & Recharge with Swanky

An increasing number of subscription brands are migrating to Shopify and Recharge, a modern, scalable and low-friction alternative to legacy or custom ecommerce platforms that have become too slow, complex or expensive to maintain.

Swanky is a Shopify Platinum Partner and Recharge Elite Agency, recognised by clients and SaaS partners as the leading authority on DTC subscriptions in the Shopify ecosystem. We’ve helped numerous brands launch and grow their subscription models on Shopify and Recharge – improving the customer experience and driving commercial success.

If the pain points we’ve discussed in this article resonate with you as a subscription retailer,  reach out to our team to discuss the opportunities that a migration to Shopify and Recharge could unlock.