Appstle Bundles Features

Appstle Menu is a functionality developed ground-up by Appstle Inc. The main idea behind this functionality is to reduce the friction involved in shopper navigation of store and product browsing. The feature operates at the collection level . With this, a merchant can make multiple collections visible in the same page and customers can easily navigate through them, using different tabs.

The unique aspect of Appstle Menu is that it is applicable to both one time purchases and subscriptions.Merchants can define custom filters within a collection tab for better and easier sorting of products. If you'd like to have a live demo of it.

Bundling will enable you to motivate customers to purchase more of their desired products in your store, and spend a higher share of their wallet with you. Bundling can be done using similar and connected products that belong to a niche (e.g. face wash bundled with toner and moisturizer)

Appstle’s bundling supports both static fixed bundles , which can only be defined by the merchant,or mix and match bundles which can allow the customers to select/deselect the products provided in the bundle. To have a live example of the bundling feature.

Bulk Automations was developed so that merchants can make changes such as next delivery date, removing/replacing variant ID, etc in bulk and efficient manner, cutting down the hassle of going over each subscription contract, to make the required change.

Combo pricing is a sub-functionality for our build a box feature that allows the merchant to pre-fix the final price of the box, irrespective of the price of the components in it. The merchant can set parameters such as the number of component items (e.g. 3 items), description of component items (e.g 1 meal, 1 drink, 1 side), and fix the total price.

Combo pricing has innovative use cases across a wide range of industries (e.g. Meal Plans such as HelloFresh, Digital subscriptions such as Apple One, etc).

Custom Shipping, also termed as shipping profiles will allow you to create shipping rates and conditions specific for each subscription plan, to incentivize shoppers to purchase subscriptions and to reward loyalty. You can define free subscription shipping, as well as custom shipping rates on the basis of weight, geo, and order value conditions.

The free trial functionality will enable the merchant to offer free trials for their subscription products. Merchants can have full capability of defining the custom trial period and the terms. After the trial period ends, the subscription contract will automatically be switched to the general frequency of the subscription selling plan, and the customer will be billed for the next recurring order.

With gift subscriptions, customers can have the ability to gift their friends or family subscriptions to their favorite products. Appstle Subscriptions makes this possible, by having the checkout to have separate billing and shipping addresses.

Inventory check and management is a feature that notifies the merchant of stock levels for products that are a part of subscription plans and recurring orders. The feature gives the merchant the option to pause subscriptions on low/no inventory SKUs, or continue with them, based on replenishment cycles. The merchant also has the option to swap the SKU with a similar variant.

Loyalty features will allow a merchant to offer advanced and tiered discounts (up-to unlimited tiers), free gifts, free shipping, etc after a pre-specified number of recurring orders are complete for a customer. An example of loyalty feature would be to up the discount on recurring order to 15% from 10%, after 10 deliveries, to ensure the customer’s interest and engagement is intact.

Merchant created subscriptions or manual subscriptions enables the merchant to create a subscription on behalf of the customer. This is a useful tool when the customer is unable to subscribe to a product, due to reasons such as lack of e-commerce know-how, or internet instabilities.

However, for the merchant to create a subscription for a customer, the customer should already have a saved payment method on Shopify.

The mixed cart functionality allows the customers to have both one time purchase products and subscription (recurring) products in the same checkout session. The feature is focussed on making the purchase journey smooth and seamless for shoppers.

One Time Product Addition will allow customers to add products to the very next or upcoming subscriptions order. It will be a one-time addition of the product only, and will not be included in the future recurring orders.

The main idea of this optional feature is to provide convenience to customers, who do not have to go through the full checkout process and pay additional shipping fee to buy a one-time product, WHEN they have an on-going subscription with your store.

The passwordless magic link will allow the customers/subscribers to access their customer portal without the hassle of entering their credentials to login to the account. They can receive their magic link in every subscription related email.

However, note that by Shopify policy, magic links expire after 7 days due to security reasons, and need to be re-generated.

Product Swap Automation is used for automated swap of products that can be set in a cycle, or can be applied to all future recurring orders . You can pre-define the swap cycles on Appstle merchant dashboard, and the product-swaps will happen automatically as the recurring cycles progresses. The following features are also supported within product swap.

Carrying over discount of the source subscription plan of the product itself.

Applying automation from/after a specific number of cycles.

Product swap can be set up by the merchant (example: coffee flavor swap every season), or if the merchant wishes, by the customer (example: swapping newborn diapers with 0-3 months diaper as their baby grows)

Quick Checkout Link allows merchants to create direct checkout links for specific variants with pre-selected, auto-charging selling plans. Think, Amazon’s ‘Buy Now’ with a click (on desktop/laptop) or swipe (on mobile) feature. When the customer clicks on the Quick checkout link, they will be taken directly to the checkout with the selected subscription products in it, and will be able to complete the purchase without any friction or distraction.

Appstle℠ Subscriptions offers the retention tools functionality with which merchants can efficiently handle cancellation.

For cancellations, Appstle℠ Subscriptions offers a purposely built functionality called cancellation management .

With cancellation management, merchants can:

• Allow immediate cancellations.
• Allow merchants to gauge feedbacks on cancellations by showing probable reasons to the customers. The reasons list can later be used by the merchant to improve the offerings and take corrective actions to increase longitivtiy of subscriptions.
• Allow merchants to show a special message that can be used in various forms like offering a discount, or with a custom message that can result in probably retention of the customer.
• Allow customers to put a temporary pause on the subscriptions for a defined period of time rather permanently cancelling the subscriptions.

Here is a video of the flows offered by Appstle℠ Subscriptions for cancellation management functionality:

Appstle℠ Subscriptions offers the retention tools functionality with which merchants can efficiently handle churn.

For churn, we have a functionality dunning management in place. Dunning Management allows the merchant to efficiently configure and decide what would happen if there is a failed recurring payment scenario. With dunning management, the merchant can decide:

• How many attempts should be made before marking a billing iteration failed?
• With what intervals can those attempts be made?
• After a recurring billing iteration has been marked as failed what should be the behaviour system should be adopting with the subscription either putting a permanent hold on the subscription (cancel), either pausing it temporarily (pause) or skipping that specific billing iteration.

SKU sync functionality automatically extends any SKU changes done on Shopify’s product backend to Appstle.

‘Cart page widget’ shows the subscriptions widget in the cart of a customer. When a customer has a one time purchase in their cart, the cart page subscriptions widget will show a check-mark with a custom discount, if the product were to be bought as a subscription. The widget can be accompanied by a message such as “Subscribe for this product and save 20%”.

The ultimate aim is to incentivize the customers on all the tactical locations (cart page being one of them).to opt for a subscription purchase.

A cart widget can look like this:

Subscription upsell is an indirect form of advertising similar products. A group of related products can be shown on the customer portal. Customers will have an option to add the related or complementary products as a part of their subscription contracts.

Unlike one time product addition, subscription upsell feature will include all the products selected by the customer, in future recurring orders.