💡 How to Set Up a Subscription Business...
4 essential strategies to thrive in the subscription economy: Danielle Laity outlines how to build an online presence, manage logistics, organize warehousing, and ensure easy payments, fostering enduring customer bonds for a sustainable subscription business.
Shortly after the rise of digital business in the early 2000s, we all learnt a pretty crucial lesson: You can’t just keep forking out money to get new customers.
Fostering loyalty and return business was the name of the game for most of the 2010s.
But if you caught last week’s How Would You Build It podcast on unlocking the township economy, you’ll know a major SA trend right now is creating lifestyle-based subscriptions like Ucook etc., rather than just once-off e-commerce sales.
Good for the customer, but more importantly, good for business.
It’s the global trend called the subscription economy and basically requires building long-term customer relationships, in exchange for steady, predictable income. Here’s how to get going …
What you need to get set up
1. Get an online presence
If you can build a website, great: There are lots of easy low/no-code tools like Webflow or WordPress with commerce capabilities. Otherwise, you can simply set up a LinkTree to cross-promote various social channels and places where you display products/services – and even link to your payments processing (see Point 4 below). You can even use Whatsapp as a way to get customers.
2. Get logistics/delivery sorted
One of the main plays in subscriptions is making sure your customers get their goods every month. Fortunately, you have flexible options like Pargo. They offer a practically nationwide delivery network using pickup points (so you don’t have the headaches of home delivery). And it also gives your customers some options about where and when they collect their goods. Nice.
3. Organise your warehousing/storage
Next, you want your stock to be secure and easily accessible to customers when they need it. So look at services like Parcelninja which offers smart warehousing, storage, picking, packing and even integration with bigger retailers. It’s just so much easier than trying to store and manage all your stock from home.
4. Get super-easy payments collection
Lastly, and probably most importantly, you want to make paying for your services simple, easy, effective and enjoyable – no more haggling and stressing over late EFTs on WhatsApp, please!
That’s when you get yourself a smart social payment solution like WigWag. It comes with a handy subscription API that you just set up for the customer once and then it’s all automated – it’ll even do automatic retries if a debit fails for whatever reason.
And there you have it; with everything automated, you can focus on what’s really important: Growing your subscription business!
Got a startup business model hack? Hit reply and let us know (and maybe you get featured here, too).
