151: 3 Website Platforms for Your Subscription Box Business

Is tech holding you back from launching your subscription box? Is the thought of making decisions on what platform, what plugin, what app to use just shutting you down? I've made it as simple as possible for you. Let's talk about my top 3 website platforms and weigh the pros and cons of each. 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 Launch Your Box podcast. We're going to talk about tech today, and it's not a topic that I talk a lot about on this podcast, but it's definitely one of the things that trips up most subscription box owners when starting their subscription box. It's really one of the first big decisions that you'll make in your business after you decide on the fact that Hey, I'm going to start a subscription box. That's the biggest decision, really understanding who your ideal customer is and what you want to put in the box. Now that your idea is solidified, the really, the next big decision is what website platform am I going to put my subscription box on? And that can really shut people down. A lot of people get stuck here. And matter of fact, I know you've heard my story, but this is where I got stuck. For a little over a year in starting my subscription box, I was a brick-and-mortar store. I had never sold anything online. I had a real simple website that had some pictures, had an about me section, gave my location and my store hours. I was not selling anything online when I started my subscription box. So I went down this path of how was I going to do this? I knew that I needed a website, but I didn't know, and it's so overwhelming. There are hundreds of website platforms out there, and that's where we get into this decision paralysis sometimes, is that we just don't know what to pick. So we go on this endless route of researching, looking, reading, finding the pros and cons of every platform, and we can spend months doing that and virtually take no action in our subscription box business by doing that. What I've got for you today is really to help you with this decision. There are 3 platforms that I truly recommend for your subscription box business, and when we think about the hundreds that are out there, if I can narrow it down to 3 for you and really tell you the pros and cons of each of them and really help you understand why you should be on which platform, it's really going to help you make that decision and make progress faster. So let's talk about my top 3 today and let me give you the rundown on them and then that will allow you to make a decision because what I want most of all, and I hope you know this from listening to my podcast, is I want you to make progress. Everything that I do in my business is how can I help these subscription box owners take the next step forward? How do I help them understand what they're doing? How do I help them build their audience? How do I help them get launched and actually make some money? The goal here is how can I help you? And that's what this podcast is about. When you're sitting there thinking about your website platform, especially if you're not a techie person, you're really overwhelmed by that. And if you don't have anybody you can talk to, if you don't know who to ask, if you don't have a techie person in your life that can help you make a decision, sometimes it feels like an impossible decision to make because you just don't know enough information. So let's talk about it. All right. Number 1, let's talk about the first option. And these are in no particular order. They're just 1 through 3. I'm going to give you this one because this is what I use. Option 1 is WordPress WooCommerce. If I were to do it all over again, I'm not sure that I would pick this platform, but I do love this platform. It is one of the best e-commerce platforms that you can have in your business. It is one that is very widely used in the e-commerce industry. WordPress is the platform. WooCommerce is the plugin needed to sell products. And then you need WooCommerce subscriptions. That's what you need to sell recurring products like a subscription box. So it's really a threefold thing here, and I want to help you understand what those are, why you need them, because if you don't understand it, then you get into this, I don't understand what she just said. She just said three things that I need. WordPress is free. WordPress is the platform, okay, that is the website. You'll have a WordPress site. Then what you need on WordPress to help you sell products is a plugin called WooCommerce that is also free. So you're going to add a plugin to your WordPress site. So a WordPress site is what I had when I started my brick and mortar. I didn't sell anything. I didn't have the need to sell anything. So I just had a WordPress site, had pretty pages. It had all the information. It had our store phone number. That was my WordPress site, and that's why I started with WordPress, because I wasn't selling anything online. Okay, so then when we decided that I was going to sell the subscription box online, I needed the capabilities to be able to sell something, and WordPress didn't give me that capability. That's where WooCommerce came in. So WooCommerce was a plugin that we added to WordPress, and that allowed me to sell things online, but it didn't stop there. In order to sell recurring products, I needed another plugin called WooCommerce Subscriptions that worked with WooCommerce, that worked with WordPress, that allowed me to sell subscriptions. Okay. And that cost me about $200 to $300 a year. When I look at the cost of this website, WordPress was free, WooCommerce was free. My WooCommerce subscription cost me $200 to $300 a year. And then I also have to pay for hosting for my site. It's on a server, you have to pay for hosting, it's a monthly fee. It can range from a few dollars a month to hundreds of dollars a month based on the size of your business, and that will change as you grow. I've had to increase my hosting as my subscriber count has grown so that it can handle the amount of transactions that are coming through my website every single month. So let's kind of talk through the pros and cons of WordPress and WooCommerce. I'm going to give you the pros and cons of all these platforms so that you can really make an informed decision for yourself. The pros of using WordPress WooCommerce is that there's a lot of flexibility and customization. This platform is highly customizable. It allows you to tailor your subscription box website to your specific needs. I have very specific needs in my business, and that's why this was a great fit for me. I have lots of variations in my subscription box between sizing and monogram and customization and all of that, and I needed to be able to not only have that ability for my customer, but for us on the backend to see all of that. So that was really important to me. Number 2, some more pros of using WordPress and WooCommerce is that WordPress was initially built for blogging and content management. This is a great recommendation if you're a blogger, if you have a lot of content that's on your site. This is one reason why WordPress and WooCommerce is the go-to for those kinds of businesses. Do you have a lot of content? Are you writing a blog? If you're writing a simple blog like once a month, you don't need as many features as this, but if you are blogging every single week or you have regular content that you're producing that you need to host on your website, this is another benefit of using WordPress for your site. Number 3, and this is really important to me, is the ownership of data. With a WordPress site, you have full ownership and control of your data and content. and this is not the same with the other two platforms that I'm going to talk to you about. It's an important feature to own everything on your site. Okay, and so that's one of the main benefits. And number 4, you don't have ongoing transaction or monthly fees. You will have a transaction fee with your payment processor, but for a WordPress WooCommerce site, paying for my WooCommerce subscriptions, one payment for the year, I don't have monthly charges for my website aside from the hosting. Okay, so those are really the benefits of the WordPress WooCommerce site. Now let's talk about the cons. I want to give you the pros and the cons. Number 1, there's a large learning curve. While it's user-friendly, it has a vast library of resources, plugins. Of all the 3 platforms that I'm going to talk to you about today, this has the biggest learning curve. If you are not techie and you're building your website on your own, I would not recommend a WordPress site. Okay? If you are hiring someone to build it for you and you just need to be able to know how to use it, absolutely you can do that. If you're building it on your own and you're not techie, this is not the way to go. Number 2, it needs a lot of maintenance and updates. It constantly requires updating to ensure the security and the performance of your site is maintained. So you've got to have someone checking your site, updating it regularly. I have someone on my team that does that, and that's what I pay them for, is to maintain and update my website. And then number 3 is the server resources. We talked a little bit about this when I was talking about the prices, but as you grow in scale, you have to upgrade and pay for more server hosting. Okay, there's a large number of products and subscribers on my site, and that requires more server resources for optimal performance. If I don't upgrade, if I don't pay for more hosting, more server space, then what happens is my website gets slow, it starts to time out, I get those 404 errors on the backend and the frontend. So it's really something that you've got to increase your server resources as your business grows and scales. So that's option number 1, and I hope I've given you a lot of information about making that decision. Let's talk about option number 2. Option number 2 is Shopify. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows you to create an online store and sell products. It offers a wide range of tools and features specifically for product-based businesses. So where WordPress was really designed for content management, like blogging and video content and all that, Shopify was designed for e-commerce sellers, okay? Now, the cost involved with Shopify, you can get Shopify Basic right now for like $39, and then prices go up based on what your needs are. So that's like the basic Shopify plan, and then you're going to need a subscription processing app. So on WordPress, those are called plugins. On Shopify, those are called apps. Okay, and so you're going to need a subscription app to go with your Shopify account, and the prices vary from free hundreds of dollars a month plus transaction fees. So we're going to kind of walk through the pros and cons of Shopify. I would tell you that most of our members inside Launch Your Box have Shopify sites, and I'm going to tell you why as we go through the pros and cons. Okay, the pros of using Shopify are that it's super user-friendly. So it's the most user-friendly of all three while being really robust enough to grow and scale with your subscriptions. It is easy to set up your own website and manage your online store. So for me, this is one that you could really set up your own website and not be a technical genius over here. Okay, number 2 pro of using Shopify: it has app add-ons. The Shopify App Store has a wide variety of options to customize your site and features, and one of those apps would be setting up your subscriptions, which we'll talk about a little bit. I just recorded a whole brand new tech module inside Launch Your Box training library. So if you're a member, I'm going to walk you through those apps that you're going to need for your Shopify site. And I get really in-depth with your email CRM, your payment processor, and on all the, all the technical pieces that you need inside that training module. Today we're just really talking about the platform so you can make a decision, but I go more in-depth inside Launch Your Box on that kind of thing. If you need the information, if you're not a member of Launch Your Box and you'd like to join us, you can just head over to joinlyb.com and that module is right in our training library. Number 3, the pros of using Shopify is payment processing. That's one thing I talk about in that training lesson, but Shopify easily supports a wide range of payment processors and its own processor. So you can set up Shopify Payments, which is its own payment processor, or you can set up external processors like PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Square, Stripe, etc. Like, they're integrated with all of those payment processors. Another pro of using Shopify is its scalability. It is suitable for businesses of all sizes, and I know subscription box owners that have 20 subscribers using Shopify, and I know subscription box owners that have 30,000 subscribers using Shopify. So it's really scalable for all sizes, whether you're just starting out or you're growing and scaling. It has plans and functionality to grow with you and your subscription box business. Now let's talk about the cons of using Shopify. It does offer different pricing plans, but that monthly cost needs to be, needs to be considered, especially if you're just starting out. Each app that you add to Shopify, some are free, some come with a cost, and there are transaction fees involved. So Shopify charges transaction fees for each sale if you use a third-party payment processor. That's something I discuss in the tech module that I just set up for Launch Your Box. But there are monthly costs involved with Shopify. There's just one-time costs involved with WooCommerce. Number 2, it has limited blogging and SEO capabilities. So Shopify does allow you to add a blog to your online stores, and it's great for beginner bloggers if you want to start a blog, just getting some content on your site. We talk about that a lot in Scale Your Box, about how this content creates visibility for you. If I do a blog on how to style a t-shirt every single month and I've got my t-shirt club in there, my subscription, and I'm talking about keywords, that's going to make me more searchable, right? So you can do that. On Shopify, but you're limited to just basic blogging function— functionality. And same for SEO, you're just really limited to the basic SEO, and that might be all you need in the beginning. But if you want to really extensively blog, that's not the platform for you. Number 3, you don't own your site. And this is what we were talking about with WordPress, like you completely own that. You don't own your site. Shopify is a hosted solution. I mean, that could be a plus for you because you're not going to have to pay for hosting like you would on WordPress, but you are dependent on Shopify's infrastructure. If the platform goes down, which it has multiple times since I've had it, your shop is down. Also, Shopify can shut down your shop for any violation of its policies. I, I want you to look at it like this: you're building a house on land that isn't yours when you use a platform like Shopify. So you're building your house on land that is not owned by you, and that's what I want you to consider. And it's not always like— we haven't seen like mass issues with Shopify. I have seen Shopify sites get shut down for trademark and copyright violations that aren't actually true. I got a message one time for some of the Kate Spade products that I sell, but I'm licensed permission to sell Kate Spade. I buy from Kate Spade Distributing, and so I had to stop selling Kate Spade because it was kind of dinging my shop on Shopify. And so I was like, it's not worth it. I don't want to get my shop shut down because they think I'm selling, you know, fake Kate Spade. If they take my Shopify site down, like, it's done. I have to start over on a different platform. So that's why I love the WordPress platform, because you own that. That is your land you're building a house on. You don't with Shopify. So that's just one thing to consider. Okay, let's get into option number 3, which is Subly. Subly is an all-in-one subscription box platform that provides tools for managing and launching a subscription-based business. Subly really talks about being subscription first, and what that means is that your subscription box is your one main product. They are a subscription first company. They are focused solely on building a platform for subscription box owners, which is great because there are a lot of needs that subscription box owners have that not every e-commerce business owner has, right? So they are a subscription-first platform. Let's talk through the pros and cons of using a platform like Subly. Ease of use. Subly is known for its ease of use in building your subscription box site. It has templates. It's easy for beginners to set up their own website. You know, I use all of these platforms that I'm talking to you about because I never want to tell you about something that I have not used. So when I was testing out Subli, we were able to build a website, and this is not a web developer, this is not a tech person, this is just Amber and I in the warehouse sitting down. We were able to build a Subli site and have it up and running in one day. And I think that's important because that is the one thing that trips people up. It has templates. It has, number 2, it has built-in subscription management features because it's made for subscription box owners. Subly offers features to specific management like billing options, customizable subscription plans, and the ability to handle recurring payments. There's no extra plugin or app needed for those subscription payments because Subly is built for that. And then number 3, it also has built-in marketing tools. So the platform includes marketing tools such as like discount codes, promo offers, and customizable checkout pages. Now here's the cons of Subli. It has limited design customization. While the platform allows for some customization, it does not offer the same level of flexibility as the other two platforms when it comes to customizing pages and designs and things like that. It's limited. Number two, it also has limited integrations. Subli does not have as many direct integrations with third-party tools and services as the other platforms. These are mega platforms. WordPress and Shopify are mega platforms, so they just don't have as many integrations as the other platforms. They're still growing. And number 3, you don't own your site. It's the same as Shopify. You don't fully own your Subly site. If their server is down, your site is down. If they want to pull your content off, they can pull your content off. You're building your house on borrowed land again. And so Those are really things that you need to consider. But those are the 3 platforms. Okay, so those are— you don't have to go research hundreds of platforms. You can listen to these 3, understand what's going to be a good fit for you, and then you can go do some more research on these 3 platforms instead of spending your days, your weeks, your months on researching hundreds of platforms that may or may not work for you. I've got some tips. I'm going to leave you with some tips on picking a website platform because I know even after I've gone through these 3, you still have to make a decision. Hopefully I've given you enough information to help you move forward with this decision, but here's my 5 tips for you in picking a website platform. All right, number 1, don't get overwhelmed by your options. Don't look at hundreds. I am here telling you to look at these 3. Don't go look at hundreds. You're going to overwhelm yourself. I've been in the subscription box game for 11 years, okay? I work with thousands of subscription box owners every single week. I have seen it all. I have seen the platforms. I have seen what's worked. I have seen countless other platforms that we could talk about not work and people having to switch, and it's really hard to switch platforms when you have thousands of subscribers. So don't build on something that's temporary. Build right from the start. Number 2, if you already have one of these sites, don't change. Just build your subscription on it. People will come into Launch Your Box and they'll say, yeah, I have a WordPress site, but I'm trying to figure out if I should go on Shopify. If you've got a WordPress site, you're halfway there. Add WooCommerce, add WooCommerce subscriptions, get the thing up and going. It does not serve you to switch platforms when you already have half your house built? It doesn't make sense to me. So if you already have one of these platforms for your, your existing business and you're wanting to add a subscription, if you already are on Shopify and you're selling, add your subscription to Shopify. It's going to get you there. That's like the lowest hanging fruit. Stick with the platform that you have if you have one of these three. Number 3, you've got to decide which features are most important to your business. Because every one of our businesses are different. The commonality is that we have subscription boxes, but every one of us serve our audience in a different way. So I really want you to figure out what's important to you and your business as you evaluate the pros and cons of each of these. And number 4, you've got to evaluate the costs. The costs are important when you are starting out. Everything you have to come out of your pocket for limits your ability to buy inventory, to pay for help, to pay for someone to help you with tech. So I want you to evaluate the costs. And number 5, just get started. I've narrowed this down for you. Pick one and move forward. Don't let tech stop you from moving forward. We have super successful subscription box owners on all 3 of these platforms. Pick one and move forward. When you're listening to me talk about the pros and cons of each of these, there's something that resonated with you in one of them. Pick it and move forward. Don't let tech stop you like it did me. It stopped me for over a year because I couldn't figure it out, and ultimately I hired tech help, and that's what helped me. I spent almost 18 months researching this stuff in my head and never moving forward, and once I got tech help, I launched within 90 days. So sometimes we have to realize that we are not the tech expert, and it's worth our time and energy and bandwidth to hire some tech help. Whatever they're an expert in, have them build it for you. Have them teach you how to use it. You got this. Just get started. I hope this helps. I'll be back next week with another great episode. 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.