SubScription
commerce

Three things: predictability, LTV, and relationship. Subscriptions create a revenue base you can plan around, increase the lifetime value of each customer without increasing acquisition spend, and give you a direct, ongoing relationship with your buyer that informs everything from product development to retention campaigns. For DTC brands in food, drink and wellness, they're also a natural fit — these are repeat-purchase categories where subscription just makes sense.

Yes — and for DTC food and drink brands especially, build-a-box is often more effective than product-level subscriptions. It lets customers curate their own selection while you set the parameters: minimum spend, number of items, category rules. The result is higher AOV, stronger retention and a more personalised experience. As Recharge Premier Partners and Skio Partners, we've built this mechanic for several of our clients — read our guide to build-a-box and build-a-bundle on Shopify for a full breakdown.

It depends on what you're selling and how your customers want to interact with it. Some products suit a simple subscribe-and-save mechanic; others — like clothing rentals or curated meal kits — need a structured plan where customers make choices upfront. We work with you to map the right model to your product and customer behaviour, then build it properly on Recharge or Skio. Our guide to build-a-box, build-a-bundle and build-a-plan covers the different mechanics in detail.

Churn is almost always a symptom of something upstream — wrong product fit, a clunky customer portal, no proactive retention touchpoints, or a value proposition that fades after the first delivery. The fix is rarely one thing: it's flexible subscription options (skip, pause, swap), smart cancellation flows, personalised offers, and consistent communication that reminds customers why they signed up. We build and optimise retention strategies for subscription clients as part of our ongoing growth retainers — here's how to calculate and reduce your churn rate.

The ones that actually tell you how your subscription is performing: MRR, churn rate, subscriber LTV, AOV and retention rate. Beyond the basics, we'd also look at cancellation reasons, pause-to-cancel conversion, and how subscriber cohorts behave over time — these tell you where the model is working and where it's leaking. We help clients set up dashboards that surface the metrics that matter, not just the ones that look good. See our guide to ecommerce metrics for the full picture.