How to Launch a Subscription Box Website

We recently launched a subscription box website, and we’re really excited about how it turned out.

Today we’re going to give you a behind the scenes look at everything that goes into a subscription box website, specifically a look at the different tools and integrations we’re using to make sure as much of our workflow as possible is automated.

The website we’re discussing today is Farm Fed Box, a monthly subscription box of pasture raised beef, chicken, and pork. If you’ve listened to the podcast or follow us on Instagram, you’ve likely heard that after moving to Lexington, Virginia last fall, we started farming with a few friends. We’ve really enjoyed a greater connection to the land, having access to quality meat, and we’re excited to be able to share that meat with friends around the country.

When it came to the subscription box website, our goal was to create a simple, easy to navigate website — especially since we’re just getting started and proving out the concept. The biggest technical challenge was figuring out shipping and how to automate that process.

But we also wanted to make sure the website…

• Was visually appealing
• Had elements for different content types such as an FAQ section
• That customers could leave reviews
• An account section where subscribers could manage their membership
• Integrations with both a transactional email provider and our marketing email platform.

Subscription Box Website Platform Choice

We chose to build a WordPress website using the Elementor page building plugin. That gave us a lot of flexibility over how the website looks, and it’s easy enough to use that non-techie teammates can make updates when necessary.

Using WordPress with Elementor also allowed us to use WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a powerful e-commerce plugin that we’ve used many times in the past (including on this website) and we knew that it’s flexibility would allow for us to customize it specifically for our needs.

At first we explored using membership solutions such as MemberPress or AccessAlly, but ultimately we decided that those plugins weren’t quite the right fit for us. While tools like MemberPress would undoubtedly be better for memberships involving digital products, we found that it was going to require too many workarounds for our use case, especially when it came to shipping a physical product.

We ultimately settled on WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce subscriptions. WooCommerce Memberships allows us to tie a membership to the various subscriptions that someone can choose while WooCommerce subscriptions makes it easy to set-up recurring payments.

And we also are using the WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting plugins so that people can gift memberships or single boxes.

Shipping Subscription Boxes

Shipping was by far the most difficult part to set-up because the cost of shipping to California is obviously far more expensive than shipping locally.

When it came to shipping, we wanted to be able to charge different shipping rates based on location, subsidize shipping costs so that members on the west coast don’t have to pay the full shipping amount, automate the shipping label so we don’t have to manually create hundreds or thousands of labels and shop the best prices across carriers.

We ultimately settled on two tools: Shippo, which we feel really good about so far, and the WooCommerce FedEx plugin, which well… meh. 

There are probably better solutions out there than the FedEx plugin (let us know if you know of something), but it was easy enough to set-up, set shipping zones, and offset the price of different shipping zones. Our customers are charged based on FedEx’s prices – which we’ve found to be pretty representative of what it actually costs to ship a box to various parts of the country.

Shippo is a tool that we’ve been really happy with. It integrates directly with WooCommerce so orders automatically appear in the dashboard and it’s super easy to shop for the best rate or service for the product. You can also order labels in bulk, which is a timesaver.

Once the label is printed in Shippo, it moves the order in WooCommerce to “complete.”

Social Proof (Reviews) for Subscription Boxes

It was also important to us that we have a place where customers can leave reviews, which is huge in today’s world of shopping online. I randomly stumbled across a tool called Judge.Me which was originally created for Shopify. And guess what, the premium version of the tool is available FOR FREE on WooCommerce (at least at the time of the recording of this video).

Judge Me integrates with WooCommerce and gives us a lot of control over both the look and feel as well as the emails it sends out encouraging people to receive reviews.

It’s allowed us to automatically send out an email to someone a certain number of days after they receive their box – which makes it more likely that they leave us a review.

Annnddd it was super easy to set-up.

Marketing & Transactional Emails for a Subscription Box Website

For marketing emails we’re using Flodesk. It was an easy decision. The email builder is super easy to use, it’s easy to create beautiful emails, and it’s like $20 a month of unlimited emails and unlimited subscribers, which is INSANE. You can grab that same offer using the link in the description below.

The only downside is that Zapier is necessary to integrate Flodesk and WooCommerce (to make sure that new members are automatically added to a welcome sequence in Flodesk). More on that in a minute.

If you haven’t heard of a transactional email before, these are what you typically receive when you create a new login on a website, change your password, receive a bill, etc. WooCommerce has these built into their system, but if you don’t add something to help increase their deliverability, it’s likely that these sorts of emails either end up in spam or are blocked all together.

We signed up for an SMTP account with WP Mail SMTP Pro. It just ensures that our transactional emails (you know like your order has been received and your order has shipped emails) actually get into people’s inboxes.

Alright so that’s a lot of it, but not all of it… there are a few other tools that we’re using that we highly recommend on any website. These aren’t necessarily subscription box specific, but they will make your life easier… and they are…

• Zapier: Zapier helps integrate tools that don’t have integrations with each other. The only downside is that Zapier requires a paid plugin to use on WooCommerce websites. 
• RankMath Pro: It’s our SEO plugin of choice. It has a ton of features and is very reasonably priced.
• WP Rocket: Site speed is important so you want to choose a good website host, but there are tweaks you can make to your website to make it load faster, and WP Rocket makes those tweaks easier.