Sarah Williams, a subscription-box coach, explains why she switched from WooCommerce to Shopify and uses PayWhirl for recurring payments. WooCommerce gave her plugin conflicts and failed renewals after nearly a decade; Shopify handles automatic updates and scales from 50 to 30,000+ subscribers without technical headaches. PayWhirl offers flexible billing cycles and low failure rates on a free starter plan.
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If you're trying to figure out what platform to run your subscription box on, I want to save you a lot of frustration. I'm officially moving off WooCommerce, and today I'm sharing exactly what the best setup that I found for starting and scaling a subscription box business. Welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Sarah and I coach thousands of subscription box owners through launching, growing, and scaling profitable recurring revenue businesses. If you love step-by-step strategies, real talk, and a little encouragement along the way, you're in the right place. Be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss a new video. Now let's talk e-commerce platforms. This isn't just some idea or some trendy recommendation. I've run subscription businesses for almost 10 years now, and I've used WooCommerce throughout those 10 years. I've dealt with plugins, workaround, manual fixes, and I've reached a point where I've outgrown it. And as my business has scaled, I've needed a platform that is reliable, streamlined, and built to support subscriptions without all the constant troubleshooting. And this is why I'm moving solely to Shopify and specifically Specifically, I'm using Paywall as my subscription app. Now let's start with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is fine. Hear me say that, especially early on, and I'm not here to bash Woo, but over time it has become increasingly cumbersome for my subscription-based business. And here's the problem. Plugins don't play nice with each other. Updates are constantly breaking the functionality of my site. I'm having manual payment issues detaching from Stripe. I have failed renewals that require hands-on manual fixes, more time, more managing tech than I am growing the business. And at some point I've realized I'm spending too much energy fixing issues on the platform that's supposed to run for me instead of actually serving my customers and scaling my business. Now here's the big shift, and this is an important lesson for any business owner. Just because something has worked in the past doesn't mean it works forever. WooCommerce served its purpose in my business and I couldn't have grown without it. But as my subscription business grew, I needed something more stable, more reliable, more intuitive, and more scalable. And that's when Shopify became the clear choice. Shopify is built for e-commerce and that matters. And I've been using Shopify since 2020 for my one-off products. And so I've had the ability to be hands-on with it, and I know clear differences between Shopify and Woo. And at that time when I started using Shopify, it's because I was having issues with shipping profiles and products and all kinds of things on Woo that were just— it felt like a daily nightmare that we had to come in and fix. And so I decided in 2020, we're going to move all one-time products over to Shopify and see if this solves our problem. At that time, I was so so scared to even touch my subscriptions because I had thousands of monthly subscribers and I didn't know what the process was to move all of that. And I honestly was scared. And moving my one-time products took a lot of the problems and issues off of me, so I was able to manage the subscriptions better. But here's why I'm all in on Shopify for subscription boxes. Shopify handles the updates for you. When we have plugins on WooCommerce, we have to manually go in and update all of that. With apps on Shopify, it's handling it. There's No plugin conflicts. Like if I put a new plugin on Woo, it's more than likely going to conflict with something else I have. Less breakage, fewer surprises, and it's also designed to work with subscription apps. There's several subscription apps. It's designed to work through that. It's got clean integrations. It's built for recurring revenue models. Now Shopify also has the ability to grow with you. So if you're just starting out, it's great because it doesn't cost a lot of money, but also it is robust and it will grow with you. So whether you have 50 subscribers or 5,000 subscribers, the platform holds up and I don't have to worry about it breaking. I have friends with over 30,000 subscribers and all of them use Shopify. And so what I'm looking for is just a cleaner customer experience. I'm going to have a better checkout, I'm going to have better customer portals, I'm going to have fewer payment issues. And for me, Shopify removes the friction that I've been having, and friction kills growth. All right, now let's talk about Payroll, because with Shopify, you need to have an app that runs your subscription, okay? And the app matters almost as much as the platform, because if you have a great platform and a crappy app, it doesn't matter what you do. and I have seen a lot of subscription apps. I coach a lot of students and a lot of people use a lot of different things, and Payroll stands out for a couple key reasons. They have monthly, quarterly, prepaid, all cleanly handled. No matter what your subscription is, you've got options there. It works beautifully for subscription boxes. There's fewer failed payments, there's better retry logic, there's less manual intervention, it's not overly complicated, and it does what subscription subscription box owners actually need. Payroll feels like it was built for businesses that want subscriptions to work and not require constant babysitting, and that's what I'm feeling right now. So who is this Shopify plus Payroll combination best for? It's best if you're starting a subscription box and you want to start off with it building right. It has great pricing. Payroll is zero on its very first plan, so you can get in and not have to pay anything until you actually start getting subscribers. It is great for someone that is on Woo and feeling stuck and tied to that platform. We've had lots of conversations with Payroll lately, and I feel very confident about our migration over. And it's really for someone who's tired of manual payment issues and you want a platform that supports growth and not stress. It's about setting yourself up on where you're going and not just where you're at today. So when we look at tech, if I was starting a brand new subscription box business from zero, I would start with Shopify, hands down. If I am at a point where I'm frustrated with my platform, I would move to Shopify, hands down. One of the biggest mistakes that I see— choosing a platform based on what's cheapest. We can't do that. You're not thinking about long term. Why don't you think about what subscription box owners that are successful are using? And if I polled people right now, I would tell you 80% of subscription box owners are using Shopify. Your tech platform should support your business, not slow you down. When I think about WooCommerce right now, I feel like it's sucking my energy every day. Switching platform later is possible, like I'm doing right now, but choosing the right one early on is going to save you time, money, and energy. For me, moving to Shopify with payroll is about simplicity, stability, and scalability. I want my platform to work quietly in the background so I can focus on growing my business and not fixing tech issues, and that's why Shopify is the place to be. So if you want step-by-step guidance on how to start, launch, and grow your subscription box, including choosing the right tools and building a system that actually works, I'll walk you through all of this inside Launch Your Box. You can join us at joinlyb.com, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel. I'll see you in the next video.
