057: Building a Subscription Box on Shopify with Nicole Jenney

Ready to start your subscription box business, but paralyzed by the tech? Not ready to blow your budget before you even get started? I'm chatting with our group Shopify expert on exactly what you need to get your box launched. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the podcast. I am super excited because I have Nicole here, and if you're a member of Launch Your Box, you already know Nicole Jenney. She is our Shopify expert inside our group. She just hits us with those knowledge bombs about all the tech all the time, but she's a lot of fun. And so we're going to have fun today. We're talking about Shopify today and building a subscription box business with Shopify. Nicole's going to break it down for us. So if you've been out there struggling on kind of getting yourself started. For me, if you guys know my story, the tech stopped me for a long time. I knew what product I was going to put in there. I knew how to make packaging. I knew how to ship. But man, that tech stopped me. It stopped me for a long time from moving forward. And we're going to try to remove that barrier for you today. We're going to talk about Shopify. We're going to talk about how it is for your subscription box business. Nicole is not only our Shopify expert, but she's also a very successful subscription box owner. Nicole, say hi. Tell them about your box if they don't know.

Hey everyone. Happy to be here. I always love talking to you, Sarah. We, we have the best time geeking out about tech, don't we? Um, yes, I'm a subscription box owner. I have a guinea pig subscription box. We send products for guinea pigs and piggy parents. Gpigbox.com is my website. We started it just over a year ago.

Yeah. It's been an amazing journey. If you don't know Nicole's story, she's also on episode number 13 of this podcast. I interviewed her in April, so about 8 months ago. And I mean, things have— things were amazing when I interviewed you, right? But how many subscribers do you have now?

Uh, we, we send out over 700 boxes a month.

It's so incredible. Just loving on those guinea pig owners and all those cute little animals out there. I just love it. You came in, you found your niche, you got going, but also you helped me fill a need within the group. This tech need that Seems to just trip people up all the time. And so today we're gonna use your tech brain and not your guinea pig brain. We're gonna use the tech brain today, but let's just start by having a conversation about the platforms that are out there. What's out there, Nicole?

There's a lot out there.

A lot.

There's a lot out there. They all do different things. They all kind of work, but the best thing out there by far, I think, is Shopify. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that was created specifically to sell products on the internet. So it's kind of a done for you in the sense that the store is made, the cart is made, the checkout, all of those processes that you would either have to do from scratch or you'd have to add on to something else that kind of works. But for $29 a month at your base price, it's a no-brainer. This is absolutely the way to go.

So what we're saying, if you're listening and you haven't figured out what platform you want to be on, the first thing that I want you to understand is how important it is to have your own platform, your own website that you are you're driving traffic to. Yes, there are some platforms out there that are kind of set up, done for you. You could plug and play and be set up by this afternoon for very little cost, but you're going to pay a premium price to be on their platform. It's kind of like Etsy. We talk about Cratejoy, there's a couple others, but it's like Etsy. You can get on Etsy relatively cheap, you can start selling stuff, but you're in this pool of marketplace for all subscription boxes. So when we talk about having your own platform, you're going to be the one driving traffic to this marketplace. So do you want to, do you want to send people to other subscription boxes or do you want to send them to your own website? When people say, I got the subscription box and they'll say, oh, where'd you get it from? And they say Cratejoy, or, you know, it's like when you buy something on Etsy and somebody says, oh, where'd you get that? Oh, I got on Etsy. They don't reference you. It's not your protected space. And so when we're building a subscription box business, we think about the long-term. And I want you to understand right here, right now, this is not a get-rich-quick business. And so when we start this business, we're really thinking about longevity, longevity with our businesses, longevity with our company. And so if you can start off with your own platform and one that works, not one that's cheap or one that's free or one that, you know, you've maybe done a few other things on, start off with one that is built for e-commerce, number one. Start off with one that is integrated for subscription boxes because not all platforms are. They can give you workarounds, but it's not going to work with you very easily. And so that's the first step is having your own platform, setting yourself up for the long term. And yes, you could do this on a lot of different platforms, but you're probably going to have to switch to a more subscription box friendly platform before you even get to 100 subscribers.

That's right.

So you already mentioned that it's only $29. Tell us why we choose Shopify. What are the pros of getting on Shopify?

So many, so many, but the biggest things you touched on, it's already set up to take payment. It already integrates seamlessly with subscription type applications. And we don't need to do any sort of like custom development. So I think what people expect with these like free or very inexpensive or out-of-the-box type of website platforms is while they seem affordable initially, they get very expensive, either time or investment or development costs, because like you said, they don't do exactly what we need them to do. And you and I have both been on Shopify. I've been in the design website building world for 15 years and I have seen it all. And I can tell you that if you start on Wix or you start on Squarespace or something similar of that, you will be off of it in less than a year and you will have to redo all of these costs and all of this time and everything again. So the benefit is of Shopify, like I said, it's created specifically for selling product on e-commerce. If that's what you're doing, if you're offering a product to sell, it's already built for you. You basically upload your products. You can kind of pop a theme on there and get some beautiful aesthetics onto that, but it keeps everything at a basic level, but it's scalable. So as we grow, you know, I went from 0 to 300 subscribers very quickly, and now we're doing 700. Shopify is still my platform. And when I do thousands of boxes a month, I can still use Shopify for the same thing. So longevity, it's a great choice. They do updates all the time. We have a ton of knowledge and forums and information. And like I said, just the experience of what you and I have done, we know that this is a tried and true method. So it's not something that we would recommend if it wasn't tried and true, if we haven't used it ourselves.

And there's so many of the members that use it as well that have subscriptions from 50 subscribers to 1,500 subscribers. So we know that no matter what your volume is, it's going to stay with you long-term. And you know, people think, okay, well, what's the cost of it? And you mentioned $29, but there's like no upfront front fee, like it's legit $29, right?

Yeah. Plus tax, maybe.

Yeah.

$31. $31 to get you started on a very basic platform. And then from there we can talk about what we need, the bare minimum, and then we can talk to like how expensive it can get or what you can add to it. But to get started to build a store and product, it's $29.

It's $29. The only problem with the $29 is I need something else to run my subscription box added to that so I can run my e-commerce store on $29. I just can't run recurring payments with $29, right? So what is it that I need after I, I, okay, I sign up, I get my site for $29, I start building out my products and stuff like that. What do I need to be able to successfully sell my subscription box on Shopify?

Yeah. And actually recently Paywhirl, we've talked a little bit about Paywhirl. Paywhirl is a subscription application. Essentially what it does, it's, It's an app, just like an app you would add to your phone to enhance features on your phone. It's an app that you add to your website to enhance the feature of having monthly recurring subscription payments. And they have a free plan. So you can get the free plan. They collect 3% on your sale. So, you know, if you sell something for $30, you pay a couple bucks after you've been paid. So it's nothing upfront and it's a free plan and you have a subscription plan. So still Sarah, $29.

Yeah, $29. So I don't, I don't even have to pay anything until I actually sell something. I don't even have to come out of my pocket for the app until I actually get my subscription box. So if I'm, if I'm, you know, working really hard and I don't get my box up for 6 months, I'm not paying for payroll for 6 full months while I'm working on getting my box together and going. I love that. And I know that there are different apps. Can you talk about some of the different apps that are out there for Shopify that you can, that would do this recurring payment as well? And then tell us why Payroll is best.

Yes, I can talk about them. I don't recommend them though. If I'm being honest, I wanna be honest with you. I wanna be honest with the audience. I have used, there are two others, Bold and Recharge. You may have heard these before. I did use Bold initially when I set up my store, actually it was the only option at the time and it worked great for month to month and only month to month. But in terms of growing and scaling and offering different things, we could not do quarterly. You cannot do bi-monthly. You you cannot do prepaids. Payroll does all of that. So that kind of ticks all those boxes if that's something that you might want to offer. And even if you don't want to offer it now, you might want to in the future.

So, and then switching is harder later.

Yeah. Moving 700 subscribers took a week. It's doable. But in my opinion, Payroll is the leader. There's also an application called Recharge and Recharge, while it does offer bi-monthly, I believe you can do prepaid, you can do quarterly. I do believe you have to create separate products for each of those plans. And I think that becomes an issue with customer choice overload. If someone's here to buy your subscription box, you should present them with one product or, you know, however many boxes you're offering, but you should not have my monthly box, my 3-month box, my 6-month box, my 12— it's too much. So the great thing about Payroll, they won't choose anything, right? That's what I call choice overload. They'll, they'll kind of be overwhelmed and walk away. Payroll's lovely because this little widget or this option integrates right into the product. And if you have different plan options to select, they're all right there on the same product for the customer. Having a free trial, having a free plan with the 3% that you pay in fees, price-wise, it's more affordable than the others and it's the most robust. And as of literally last week, they added So many more features that make it even better. So I can't praise them enough. They're a great team. I talk to them weekly. We have a very close connection, but they're, they're just awesome. They're, they're worlds ahead of Recharge and Bold in my opinion.

Okay. So we've got our basic Shopify plan and now we're adding in an app called Paywhirl. It's P-A-Y-W-H-I-R-L. And so do I need —than a payment processor when I'm on Shopify? I know that I need that on WooCommerce, but do I need that on Shopify too? No.

And actually Shopify's agreement with these recurring payment subscriptions is that payment must process through Shopify Pay. So Shopify Pay is included with Shopify. It's the payment system. It's a secure checkout. You do not need any third-party payment processing, which All the more reason it makes it so easy because I do not have to integrate anything separately. So you do have to use Shopify Pay. Some people like to have the option to offer Stripe or PayPal is a big one. A lot of people like to pay with PayPal. You can offer those as well, but you have to process subscriptions through Shopify Pay. So that will be your main payment method.

I kind of like that because I don't love subscriptions being run through PayPal because of the messy backend, but I do love the option of one-time products being purchased with PayPal. So having the ability to have PayPal as a checkout for my one-time purchases, but not my subscriptions, I kind of like that, that functionality too. So, okay. So we don't need an extra payment processor. We're only talking about payroll. Are there other apps that I would need when I'm setting up my Shopify?

Site? The first one I would recommend big time, which is also free, we talk about Klaviyo. Yeah. So Klaviyo is a CRM service. Think of this as customer relations management, or I'm sure you've all been part of CRM before and you maybe don't even know it when you sign up for text messages from Ruggable or email newsletter from somebody that you follow and they send you coupons and updates to your inbox. All of that is managed through CRM or customer relations management software. So signing up for Klaviyo is free until you have 500 subscribers or something like that. So you can sign up for Klaviyo for free.

Oh no, let's not confuse them. You said 500 subscribers. We're talking email subscribers, email subscribers, and not box subscribers. It's adding people to your list. You're building your list. Klaviyo is our email CRM that we recommend over here in Launch Your Box. And it integrates seamlessly with Shopify. So you can connect your customers to your marketing platform very easily and also to your subscription box.

And the app to integrate with Shopify is free. We like that word free. It's free. It also integrates your products into your emails and text messaging SMS if you want to do that. So Klaviyo is a great platform and it pays for itself over and over again if you utilize it. If you're not using it and you're not staying up to date with sending campaigns and things like that, then it could become costly. But I think we pay, I think we paid $67 a month or $90 a month, which sounds like a lot, but it generates $6,000 in revenue for my business. So at the end of the day, it's peanuts. It really is. And the nice thing about it, again, we talk about scale. It is free to start and it scales with you as you grow. So these extra costs that come in, um, it's nice to not have to have all of that cash that you have to spend in order to get started, right? Yes.

It's like as you grow, then you start paying for it. But at that point, you're, you're making money, um, in your business, you're making a profit, you're making some revenue. And so you then you have higher expenses as you're making money. And so then those expenses seem very, very small. Like that $60 seems very small to your $6,000 in revenue. And so it's not like this pit in your stomach that I have to fork over all this money right up front, not knowing if this is going to be successful, not knowing if this is going to work, because we all feel that way when we're starting something brand new. Like, is this a good idea? Is this going to work? And we don't have to throw a bunch of money into something. You know, if it doesn't work, and it's okay if it doesn't work, we just adjust and we try again. And I love that all these applications allow us to do that without breaking the bank. Right. So we've talked platform, Shopify. We then need to add an app to set up our recurring payments, and that's Payroll. I am going to integrate Klaviyo. So I'm going to go to Klaviyo, sign up, and then I'm going to connect that app into Shopify to connect my store to my Klaviyo account. What about shipping? Do we need a shipping platform?

My answer to this would be not right away. If we're trying to stay conservative with our spending, Shopify offers fulfillment right through the platform. You can fulfill up to 50 orders at one single time, so you do not need a platform right away for fulfillment. But once you are fulfilling more than 50 products in a sitting, you know, if you're going a couple days a week and you've got hundreds of things to fill, um, ShipStation is a great platform, and I think that starts at $9 a month.

Yeah, and there's even like a free month trial for ShipStation too, so I think you get free 30 days or something like that.

Of course, and if you're shipping out 50 items or more each time you sit down to ship, the $9 a month probably isn't a big concern of yours.

It's gonna just streamline things because you can bulk print, so you can select all your subscriptions, hit one button, all your labels are going to pop out. Like, it's awesome when you get to the point where you need it. I remember shipping when I had those first like 44. And back then I didn't even have ShipStation. I was literally having to key in the men one by one. It was, it was awful. And then I wasn't on Shopify. I didn't know that I needed a shipping platform. And so as I grew and then ShipStation came, it was like, oh my gosh, it was like the best thing ever. It was like peanut butter to jelly to my shipping woes. And so, and now it's nothing. Like yesterday we shipped out 1,500 packages in the afternoon and it was nothing to spit out 1,500 1,500 labels. They're all the same weight, they're all the same thing. We just click them all and go, and it saves so much headache and so much time. For sure.

Love ShipStation, and I can't praise that application enough. 3 clicks from my sign-in, select everything, get a preset, print, and 700 labels come out of the printer. It's awesome.

Yes. Now, if they could just figure out for me how to alphabetize by last name in ShipStation, I'd be set. They alphabetize by the first name, but because we, we pack our boxes by alphabet customization, not by order number because of their monogram. That's the only thing. But someday maybe ShipStation will call me after this podcast and we can work that out. Yeah.

Have you talked to them? Have you told your rep you need that? I have.

Oh, go ahead, do that. I will. Okay.

Let me interject here. I called Payroll when I was on Bold and I had some people who were interested in moving. I called them. I talked to— shout out to Lincoln over at Payroll. I swear I talked to him weekly and I came to him at the beginning of January and I said, I really need to see if admins or customers change their account. I really need to see this. I need to be able to sort by this and filter by this. And wouldn't you know, last week, 90% of those requests have been added to payroll. That's good. Tell people what you need. Our customers tell us what we need.

I'm getting coached right now by Nicole. It's totally fine, Nicole. Okay. So now we know what we need and it doesn't sound like we need a lot. And I think that's what a lot of our members, and maybe if you're not a member and you're listening and you're thinking, okay, it feels The tech feels heavy, but if you really break it down and, and you only need a couple things to get you started, you need to set up your shop in Shopify. You need to connect payroll and you need to get Klaviyo. If we really just talk about those 3 things that will get them started. And it's not crazy to think that they could set all of that up on their own. Is it?

Is that crazy? Even if you're not tech savvy, even if you're not tech savvy, especially if you have resources, like yourself, like me, like people in the Launch Your Box group. You can go on there and ask a question. You can talk to people who've been struggling with the same thing. Utilize your resources. That would be my advice.

And what I love is Nicole, they may not know this, but when you started helping me with tech talks inside the group, so you started to come on and answer questions and we would, we do a live every month together and we answer their tech questions. You said, you know what, I need to provide a more in-depth resource to teach people step by step by step. So they set up things right. So they learn about the tech that they have for their business. So they can go in and update anything they want to, and they don't have to pay web developers to do that or someone else to set that up for them. They become knowledgeable in an area where they think they're not knowledgeable. And you built a course out specifically for our members. That goes through everything we just talked about and more. And you set them up step by step. This is what you pick. This is what you do. This is how you do it. This is how you select it. So if you're someone that is sitting there paralyzed in fear of doing this because of the tech, you've built an amazing resource for that specific person. Can you tell them about your course?

Yes, I would love to. My course is called Shopify Simplified, and that's exactly what it is. We take everything from these resources that we talked about or these platforms, Shopify, Payroll, Klaviyo. I take all of my knowledge and I've brain dumped it into videos. And when you sign up for the course and you enroll in the course, you get everything released to you at once. It's designed to be an 8-week program. And that's just to kind of get your attention for 40 minutes to an hour a week. I've had people complete it in less than a week and a half. And have their site up and running. So if you can imagine people who've been paralyzed, I've had a couple clients who have taken this course and they've said, I've been paralyzed for 3 years. I've been paying $30 a month for 3 years and not gotten my Shopify store anywhere. And then I signed up for your course and in a week and a half it's up and it's running. So I wanted to make sure that people are starting off on the right foot and having the right foundation, because so many times I've seen people start somewhere and have to backtrack, have to start over. And it's just simply because all of these resources are kind of everywhere. So I had the knowledge to take it all together, wrap it up, top it with a bow and hand it off to everybody else. So if you can log into a platform and watch videos, chances are you can build your own Shopify store with Shopify Simplified.

And what I love about it is that you're not only getting your store up and running so that you can start selling your subscription box, but you're building confidence within yourself. You're building confidence in your knowledge that you can do this. And Nicole walks you along and shows you how to do this. And I know that I would tell you that I always say I'm the less techie person on the planet because I, I'm just not techie. And people always like say, that's not true, Sarah. You know a lot about tech. And I know a lot about tech now because I immerse myself in it. I never wanna be one of the people that say, well, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to do that. I wanna learn how to do that so that yes, can I afford to pay someone else to do it for me? Absolutely. 100%. And I will do that all day long. But in the beginning I couldn't. Right. And I needed to learn that. And now if I need to change something, I go in and change it. I don't have to pay somebody $100 an hour to go in and change something for me. I leave them the big heavy lifting and I can do the small stuff. If I decide at midnight tonight that I want to run a sale tomorrow, I can go set up my own coupon codes. I can go create a collection. I can go put it on my, on my Shopify site. I don't need to wait a week for someone to work me into their schedule and do that for me. I can do whatever I want to do because I've invested in myself and have that knowledge. And so I think it builds confidence Absolutely. Not only, you know, in your skills, but as a business owner to know, hey, I can do this. I'm going to figure things out because we got to figure a lot of things out, Nicole, don't we? Like Facebook ads. We got to figure out product buying. We got to figure out the shipping process. We got to figure a lot of things out. And if we are just paralyzed by tech, it's going to stop us in a lot of different, a lot of those ways too. If we can overcome this hurdle, we feel unstoppable. We like, I can take on the world, you know?

Right. Right. And my whole point to this too is when I talk to people and they're thinking about it and they're on the fence to it, I always ask them the golden question. What is your time worth? What's your time worth? Not so much like an hourly rate for your time, but what is it worth to delay this launch process 6 more months, 3 more years? What if you could enroll in this? Somebody tells you from A to Z how to do it. And your business is up and running in 8 weeks. What does that look like for you or your future or your business or your career for your family? Or what is your end goal? You know, do you want to start this off on the right foot? Do you want to learn how to do it? Do you want to be empowered on how to manage it? I have some people who've already built a store, but they get the course just so they know how to manage it because a designer made it for them, handed it off to them, and they don't know what to do with it. You know, that could be part of it too. But I wake up every day and think about this course. I feel so fulfilled by it. And the people in— I have a Facebook group for the course, you know, the 60-something members who are in there. We're just like this cute little family. It's just like Launch Your Box and everyone's so helpful, but it really fulfills me to know that this is out there. This is a resource that you really can't find anywhere else that is specifically for Launch Your Box people who are starting a subscription company, need an e-commerce store, and it's all right there for them from point A to point Z.

And you just mentioned that you give them support in a Facebook group too. Where are you going to find that anywhere in the tech world? You're not. So if you're a Launch Your Box member, we do have a specific coupon code for you. And you'll find that in our Facebook group in the resources section. So you can get signed up, you can get your code and you can get started and you can get your box launched in a couple months, in a month, however much time you have to put into it, you can launch that much quicker. Nicole, this has been valuable information. I do want to ask you, always ask people when we get done with the podcast. For you, I'm going to ask you a little bit different question. What advice would you give for someone that is not tech savvy, that's been sitting around waiting, wanting to start their subscription box? What advice would you give them?

Number one, join Launch Your Box. That's a no-brainer. That's what I did. And I was tech savvy, but I still had no idea where to start. Joining that, going through, I think in 3 or 4 days, going through as much content as I possibly could. I started building my website thanks to the support of the group. Thanks to all of your videos, all the resources that you have. That would be number 1. And 2, which kind of goes along with number 1, utilize your resources. Find the expert, talk to me, talk to you, talk to everyone in the group who's done this already, because sitting here and trying to figure it out and taking hours stress off of your life. How do I, what do I— be independent, sure, try and find the answer, but these resources are here and we have them in Launch Your Box and we have them with Shopify Simplified. Utilize them because that investment, that initial investment will pay off so much more in the long run than you trying to struggle through it yourself.

Yeah, that first step is to get your box launched. So once you make it through that hurdle, The next one is getting to your first 100 subscribers, and you can't get to the first hurdle without setting up your website. So I hope this helps you take the next step. Come over and hang out with us in Launch Your Box. We're actually going to get ready to do Tech Talks here in a little bit. So we'll be jumping in the group, answering tech questions, which we do every single month. So Nicole, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on. It's always good to be on the podcast.

Bye, guys. We'll see you back here next week. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.