Subscriptions are a great way to ensure recurring revenue on an online store. Moreover, they can improve customer experience, and consequently customer loyalty as well. How can you create and sell subscriptions if you are using the Shopify platform? In our Appstle Subscriptions App review, we will take a detailed look at this app, and will try to understand how it offers a frictionless customer experience.
Appstle Subscriptions App – An Overview
Appstle is one of the top apps on Shopify app store. It offers a powerful solution to create subscriptions and recurring payments in your Shopify store. You will be able to boost customer experience and loyalty on your store by offering customers their favorite products in regular intervals.
Appstle offers a range of advanced features that will help you manage subscriptions flexibly. The app also has several customer friendly features such as easy discounts configuration, and self management of subscriptions for customers. Overall, the app merges advanced technology and delightful features to help you manage subscriptions like a breeze.
Feature highlights
- Effortlessly create and manage subscriptions on your Shopify store.
- Provide a smooth customer experience.
- Automatically process payments through Shopify checkout.
- Can make some products subscription only, or provide options for subscriptions or regular purchase.
- Customers will have the option to complete a single purchase, or opt for subscriptions with some monetary advantages.
- Offer subscription option only for a specific variant as per your store strategy.
- Allow customers to build subscription boxes.
- Display subscriptions products with special pricing.
- Widgets available for quick view and cart page.
- Drop-down and radio button modes for subscription widget display.
- Easily upsell subscriptions through regular product pages.
- Send personalized notifications to customers.
- Customers can easily manage their subscriptions through the self service portal.
- Easily track the performance of your subscription products.
- Smooth cancellation management with options to understand the reason for cancellation and incorporate retention strategies.
- Customizable with CSS.
- Dependable 24x7x365 customer support.
How to install and configure Appstle Subscriptions App?
Now lets look at how you can get this app for your Shopify store.
The first step is to find the app from the Shopify App Store.
You can simply add the app to your Shopify store by clicking the Install app button.
Once you install it, it asks to embed the Subscription widget with your current theme. The theme will be detected automatically and displayed in the modal window. If your theme is not listed in the drop-down, you can contact Appstle support team to make it compatible.
Once the Installation process is complete, you can try creating a test subscription.
Please note: Shopify supports only the following payment options for subscriptions:
- Shopify Payments
- Stripe
- PayPal Express Gateway
- Apple Pay
- Shop Pay
- Authorize.net
How to create a subscription plan using the Appstle Subscription app?
After completing the installation process, you can access the App’s settings from your Shopify admin panel. Go to your store’s admin and from the Apps section, choose Appstle Subscriptions.
Now you will be viewing the app’s dashboard, and you can see a menu on the left side with different options.
To create a new subscription, you can click the Subscription Plans option from the menu. Here you can click the Create Subscription Plan button to get started with.
In the next step, you need to enter information related to the new subscription that you are creating.
Here is a quick overview of what all information you need to enter.
Creating a Subscription plan
These are the details you need to add:
- A name for the subscription plan
- Select all the products that you want to include in the plan.
- Choose the plan type from the three available options – Pay As You Go, Prepaid One-time, Prepaid Auto-renew. For Pay As You Go, the customers pays only for the immediate order. With the Prepaid One-time plan, customers will be able to pay for multiple orders, which will have to be manually renewed after the billing cycle. Prepaid Auto-renew will automatically renew after the billing cycle ends.
- Next, set up the order frequency and a timeline. For order frequency, you can choose a number where the minimum should be 1. Timeline options are Day(s), Week(s), Month(s), Year(s).
- You can also add a Frequency plan name such as ‘weekly’ or ‘monthly’, which will be visible to customers on the product page.
- You can also a minimum number of orders, which the customers are bound to make before they cancel the subscription. Similarly, you can also specify a maximum number of orders after which the subscription plan will expire.
- The app also allows you to set a discount offer for the subscription. You can add a name, and also specify a percentage or amount discount. Please note, at the moment Shopify does not allow deletion of discounts. So once a discount is set, you won’t be able to delete it.
Once you have configured all the aspects of a subscription plan, you can click the Save button to create it.
Accessing Customers and Subscriptions
From the Customers section on the menu, you can view all the customers with an active or past subscription. By clicking the name of the customer, you can access more details about that customer.
You can access all the details of your subscriptions by going to Subscriptions option in the menu. Apart from an overview of all the subscriptions in your store, you can also get an idea about their status, customer information, relevant dates, etc. By clicking the id of a subscription, you can get more details of the individual subscription.
Customizations
Appstle offers a lot of customizations as well. Here is a quick look at some of the important customization options that you can manage.
Widget settings
You can manage the different aspects of the subscription widget such as label text, appearance, and other configuration.
Widget and Price Placement
By default, the subscription widget will be placed only on the home page. You can contact their support team to get it placed on the Collections and Homepages. This option is available only for Business and above plans.
Customer portal settings
Here you can manage different aspects related to customers such as labels, portal permissions and other configurations.
Build-a-box settings
If you are offering subscription boxes, you can customize the labels and text for those configurations.
Email Template Settings
You can customize the email notifications extensively to modify the content and the appearance of the mails with live preview.
Email Domain Settings
You can use your own domain name in the sender details for better email deliverability. The app allows you to update this setting.
Custom CSS
There are also fields to add custom CSS to modify the appearance of the widget, customer portal and build-a-box.
Advanced features
The app has a range of advanced features that will help you customize your subscription plans further. Here is a look at the major ones.
Build a Box
Build a Box is an option for subscription bundling, where customers will be able to choose the products they want to include in a subscription box. There are several successful subscription models using this feature while selling coffee, grooming products, etc.
Bulk Automations
You can update subscription data in bulk using this feature. You can modify several aspects such as Delivery Price, Subscription Status, Delivery Date and Time, etc.
Advanced Cancellation Management
You can customize the cancellation flow on your store by including additional steps. You can provide customers with the option to cancel immediately, or add a step to contact the store owner with a message for cancellation. Another option is to add different cancellation reasons, which customers can choose before cancelling a product.
Dunning Management
This feature helps you set custom flows when customers try to re-enter card details after expiration or other scenarios. The app lets you set up a pre-defined mechanism, where you can set up the number of retry attempts, and how soon they can retry after multiple failures. You can also specify what action to take in case the retry attempts are continuously failing – whether to cancel or pause subscription.
Product Swap
You can easily manage product swapping while using this app. If there is a weekly coffee subscription, you can change the flavor every week using product swap automation.
Segment base plans
The app allows you to create subscriptions for members only or non-members only based on your store strategy. You can also create other custom segments based on customer location and other parameters.
Custom shipping profiles
You can create custom shipping profiles and connect them with specific subscription plans on your store to make it more attractive to customers. If you do not create a custom shipping profile, the default shipping profile from your Shopify store admin will be applied for subscriptions as well.
Quick Action urls
The app lets you create quick action urls for different events. The available actions are as follows:
- Activate Subscription
- Add Product
- Apply Discount
- Activate and Apply Discount
- Activate and Add Product
- Add Product and Apply Discount
- Activate, Add Product and Apply Discount
Pricing
Here are the pricing details of the Appstle Shopify app.
| Plan | Price ($ per month) | Feature Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 50 Subscriptions Different Subscription Plans Email Notifications with options for automation and personalization Inventory Forecast Performance Analytics 24X7X365 Support from Dedicated Engineers |
| Starter | 10 | 1000 Subscriptions Customer Segment Based Plans Email Notifications with options for automation and personalization Advanced Subscription Management Dunning Management Inventory Forecast Performance Analytics Third-party App Integrations 24X7X365 Support from Dedicated Engineers |
| Business | 30 | 10000 Subscriptions Customer Segment Based Plans Email Notifications with options for automation and personalization Advanced Subscription Management Dunning Management Inventory Forecast Product Swap Automation Custom and Tiered Shipping Profiles Customer Portal Settings Custom Email HTML Cancellation Management Performance Analytics Third-party App Integrations 24X7X365 Support from Dedicated Engineers |
| Enterprise | 100 | No limits in the number of Subscriptions Customer Segment Based Plans Email Notifications with options for automation and personalization Advanced Subscription Management Subscription Bundling Quick-view and Cart Page Widgets Dunning Management Inventory Forecast Product Swap Automation Custom and Tiered Shipping Profiles Customer Portal Settings Custom Email HTML Cancellation Management Performance Analytics Third-party App Integrations API and Webhook support Custom Development options for custom pricing 24X7X365 Support from Dedicated Engineers |
| Enterprise Plus | Custom | All features of Enterprise plan, and… Dedicated Cloud and Storage Infrastructure On-boarding Consultation Custom Integration with internal systems Dedicated Merchant Success Manager Quarterly review calls with Lead Developer Quarterly Strategy Discussion Quick Action Settings To Control Churn Support through Phone Loyalty and Wallet Share Portfolio |
What do we think about Appstle Subscriptions App?
Appstle Subscriptions App is one of the comprehensive options to create and manage subscriptions on your Shopify store. It helps you get the best out of your subscriptions plans with the help of a wide range of advanced features. Configuring this app on your store is extremely easy and does not need advanced technical knowledge. On the other hand, if you prefer to customize the app’s settings through code, it offers options for that too. Overall, if you are planning to build a subscription business model through Shopify, you can consider Appstle.
We hope our Appstle Subscriptions App Review will help you understand how you can manage Shopify Subscriptions effortlessly. Leave us a comment if you have a query about the app.
