This is how we took Rawgeous Pet Foods from ‘no back-end’, to fully functioning, ‘build-a-box’ subscription-based eCommerce store using Shopify customisation.

In late 2020, Rawgeous Pet Foods found a gap in the market for high-quality, human-grade (yep, you could really eat it yourself) dog food. Dog food companies had been popping up left right and centre, but very few offered the quality Rawgeous offered. In the purest sense, Rawgeous intended to provide dogs around the world what nature prescribed.

The issue, however, was that the company was stuck with a set of complex requirements, that most eCommerce platforms and apps didn’t support. The previous, custom-built website, looked fantastic but did not provide the back-end order management a platform like Shopify would, and the need for a fully customisable subscription box was proving a challenge to implement. Challenge accepted – we started our Shopify customisation journey!

THE PROBLEM

1. Rawgeous needed to create a subscription based product, that customers could fully customise when purchasing, and fully manage once subscribed. This involved choosing delivery frequencies, flavour options, size of delivery boxes, even the size of the packages they came in.
2. These requirements were incredibly complex, given there is only a handful of subscription billing apps on the Shopify platform, and even fewer that integrate with a ‘build-a-box’ system.
3. The company was  using an app that did not support many of the features they needed, and as such had hundreads of subscribers that needed to be migrated, securely.

OUR APPROACH TO SHOPIFY CUSTOMISATION

Firstly, W2 Solutions needed to identify recurring billing providers that provided integrations; integrations that allow order management both on the customer side and admin side.

Next, we needed to find a way of allowing customers to fully customize their orders. For anyone that knows Shopify, is aware that there is a 100-variant limit on any given product. Meaning that if you have for example 10 flavors of food, that you can buy in 10 different weights – you have now used your 100 variant limit. 10 x 10. In addition to this, Shopify does not natively allow ‘multiple choice’ variants. Customers can only select A OR B, not A AND B. This presented two problems, firstly that there was a possibility of 128 combinations to buy a subscription, but also there was no way to mix-and-match an order.

In real terms, we needed some serious Shopify customisation and we needed to find a way for customers to add multiple flavors, choose their billing/delivery frequency of each order, and the pack size they came in.

W2’S SOLUTION

1. As it happens, Shopify doesn’t support an infinite number of recurring billing solutions, but there was one in particular that ticked all the boxes – ReCharge. ReCharge comes right out of the box with order forecasting (for admins), a customer portal to view, amend, edit and pause subscriptions (for customers) and, most importantly, the ability to import customers from competitor billing platforms via API calls, so that existing customers did not need to re-input sensitive information into their orders.
2. In conjunction with ReBundle, we created a series of interlinked products instead of variants, customers were able to check out with all the flavors they wanted, in the quantities they wanted, to be delivered when they wanted.
3. We implemented some basic buying psychometrics to help increase the number of subscriptions vs people who just bought one box alone.
4. By managing the whole process, from developers, to migration specialists, the whole project was turned around in less than 4 weeks

Result: Store conversion rates jumped 13%, Average order value by 9% and the general ease of managing customers, cash flow, stock forecasting, discount dramatically increased.

CAN YOU RELATE?

Are you tired and frustrated that no matter how much traffic you send to your store, it just doesn’t convert? Maybe your average order value is lower than expected, or you want to implement that ‘dream’ eCommerce experience for your store, but just don’t know how? That’s why we exist. We help businesses all over the world, big or small, help achieve their goals online by offering a bespoke solution that’s right for you.

Get In touch.