The Tech Tools You Actually Need to Launch Your Box

You're almost ready to launch, but is your tech stack ready too? In this Friday Fuel episode, I'm breaking down the exact tools that you need to run your subscription box smoothly from day one without the tech overwhelm. So this is your launch checklist made simple. 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 to Friday Fuel, that short actionable episode that gets your subscription box business moving. If you're new around here, I'm Sarah Williams, and today we're talking about a super practical piece of launching that too many people try to figure out on the fly, and that's your tech stack. So if you're getting ready to launch your box, let's walk through the tools that you actually need to run your business smoothly and make sure everything works before you open the cart. So here are 4 core tools that you need before you launch, okay? And so the first one is your website platform. And also in this episode, I'm gonna give you what you need so you can take notes. I'm also gonna kind of give you what they cost so you have an expectation, you kind of know what to expect when it comes into the cost of that different, the different software, the tech pieces, that you need. So let's start with the website platform. You need a storefront to sell your subscription. And if you were to ask me, Sarah, what is the number one platform that you would recommend for your website platform? I'm going to tell you Shopify every single time. Shopify's basic plan is about $39 a month, and it includes a lot of what you need to start your business. I also love WooCommerce with WordPress. WordPress is technically free, WooCommerce is technically free, but you'll need to pay for hosting and you'll need to pay for a theme. So there's some cost there involved. And then we're going to need some apps to make this work for our subscription. But for most beginners, Shopify is faster and easier to get launched, and Shopify is going to grow with you. So what you use in the beginning, I want you to be able to to scale with, because you don't want to launch, get 20 subscribers, and then a year from now you're at 200 subscribers or 500 subscribers, and now you've got to completely shift platforms. That doesn't make sense. We need to start on something that can grow with us. So the first one that you need is your website platform. And then the second thing that you need is your payment processor. Just because you sell something on Shopify doesn't mean that the payments are going to be recurring, and that's where the benefit of the subscription comes in. And we need to make sure that our payments are hitting every single month. So the way that you do this, let's just start with Shopify. You're going to need an app called Paywhirl. It's P-A-Y-W-H-I-R-L. Paywhirl. I think of Tilt-A-Whirl, right? Paywhirl. It's free for one plan that gets you started. It helps you get everything set up without having to pay for it, and it gets you up to 10 subscribers for free. And then you'll move into the $9 a month plan pretty quickly. Quickly, and there's transaction fees on top of that. So it's the best Shopify app, number one, for beginners because there's not a huge cost. Some of the subscription apps have a large cost, and if you don't have a lot of subscribers, um, that can feel a little bit out of balance for you. But Payroll also has plans, so as you grow, you can pay different plans and have less percentage of transaction fees coming out. So Payroll is good for now and it's good for later as you as well. Now on WordPress, you're going to use WooCommerce. That's how you sell stuff on WordPress. But you're also going to need WooCommerce subscriptions. And that's how you set up your subscriptions. It's $199 for the year, but you'll also use— your payment processor is going to be Stripe, and that is free, but it takes a percentage of your transaction. So it's like 2.9% of all your transactions. So you just pay as you go. You are going to have transaction fees with any payment processor. So we want to just make sure that your monthly fee and your transaction fee can align with your business goals as well. But these are costs that are built into your subscription business. So just make sure you know what they are so that they don't take our profit margin like we're building into our profit margin. So number 1, website. Number 2, payment processor. Number 3, shipping software. And I get a lot of questions about this one all the time, but you're going to have to print labels to get those boxes moving, right? If you're using Shopify, you can start with their built-in shopping, uh, shipping feature on Shopify, and that's free. It's included with your monthly pay, so there's nothing extra you have to pay for if you're on Shopify. If you're on WooCommerce, you're going to have to have a separate shipping platform like ShipStation. That's what I use, and it costs about $10 a month. For up to your first 50 shipments. But here's the thing. When you're on Shopify and you're using their free Shopify shipping, it's great. But as you start to scale, you're going to want some shipping software because with the Shopify shipping, you can only print about 50 labels at a time. Okay, well, that's great while you're getting started. Maybe you hit 50 subscribers, maybe you even hit 100 subscribers or 150. You can still use Shopify, print 50 at a time. But when you get to 500 and 1,000, you're going to want something that just pops them all out at once and you're not having to reselect and print, reselect and print. And that's where something like ShipStation comes in. ShipStation is also really great if you sell on multiple platforms. If you have your Shopify site, maybe you have an Etsy site and you can connect all of them and ship from one platform. So you don't need to start with that if you're on Shopify. You will need to start with that if you're on a platform like WooCommerce. Okay. Number 4. There's only 4, just so you know, there's only 4. Your email marketing CRM. You need email. You need it for welcome automations, abandoned cart automations, setting up waitlists, sending out failed payment alerts. And my go-to is Klaviyo. Klaviyo is free for up to 250 contacts on your list. Once you go over that, it starts at about $20 a month. You don't want to wait till you're launching to set this up. This is one of the things you want to set up in the beginning to start collecting people on your email list and your waitlist. With even just like 50 people on your list, that's going to help drive launch sales. Okay, so here's the 4: website, payment processor, shipping platform, email CRM. That's it. There's going to be people tell you that you need all kinds of things, but I like to keep things simple, strip it down to the The basics. This is what I need to get started. And if that helps you get unstuck, this is all you need. Write them down. Let's start checking them off. Now, if tech setup is making your eyes glaze over, you're not alone. That's probably the biggest hiccup that I see with our new members. You don't have to be a tech wizard to launch your box. If setting up your checkout, Setting up a landing page, setting up email automations feels overwhelming, hire it out in the beginning. You can find help for a few hundred dollars up to thousands of dollars depending on what you're looking for. If you need help setting up your Shopify store, if you need help setting up your email CRM, if you need help setting up payment settings, hire it out. I highly recommend that if you're doing it yourself, The key is to make everything work. But there's really, there's really no right or wrong. If you're overwhelmed by the tech, I recommend you hiring part of it out. At least have somebody set it up and then train you because I need you to know these things. We're going to make changes to our website, changes in our email CRM. You have to know that going forward. That's why I love a good DIY. If you can get in there and set up your own Shopify site, you're going to learn so much. But if that feels overwhelming and it's preventing you from starting, hire it out. Now, whether you DIY or you hire it out, you got to make sure everything works and you cannot do this the day before your launch. Okay. Testing is not optional before you open that cart, probably a week before at least. I want you to go through everything like you're a brand new customer. And I've got just a little 5-point checklist of things that I want you to check. Number 1, can you place a test order from start to finish? Log on to your website, put it in your cart, fill out the things, and check out. That's the first thing I want you to do. Number 2, does your email flow, your welcome flow, trigger when you check out? So do you have your email CRM set up? Okay, number 3, Does your checkout settings show the right shipping costs and any other options that you need it to? Okay. And then number 4, is it going to pick up on recurring payments? So do you have the recurring payment set up? This is why I'd love you to do this a month before so you can make sure that when the month comes back around, it triggers and recharges you. Because I've seen this before, we don't test this And you can even like set it up and then go in and change the date to like hit 3 days later. Like if it was going to renew 3 days later, test the renewal process. It does no good to set it up and then you sell 50 subscriptions and then a month later nothing processes and you're like, oh no, nothing's processing. We need to, we need to figure this out now. And then the other thing I want you to look at when you get your welcome flow, when you get your order confirmation, does all of those emails, are they all formatted the way you want them because on the back end they kind of look one way, but on the front end we want to make sure they're triggered and that they, they're formatted great when we receive them as a customer. You need to test this as a customer. Don't assume anything is working. I want you to click every link, place every order, check every flow. You worked really hard to get your first subscribers, but don't lose them because buttons don't work or emails didn't send. Okay, now I added one more bonus tech item on here because I just think it's really important. So I love a good project management tool. You've probably heard me talk about Trello or Asana. So if you're like me, you kind of got sticky notes all over your desk with to-do lists and things like that. Um, you probably need something to manage all of this, and you can start with your tech stack. You can put your tech stack into a project management tool So you are going to use something like Trello or Asana. They have free starter plans to organize your tech setup. So you can set up cards that say tech setup and you can set up lists that says, okay, this is my website and you can put all the tasks you need to do for your website. Then you can put payment processor and all the tasks and kind of keep yourself up to date with tasks and timelines. I love to use Trello and Asana boards to map out timelines, deadlines, checklists. If you're working with someone, it helps you kind of stay on top of their work, and they're free. And so I want you to go ahead and grab one of those. Now here's a mini recap because we— I talked really quickly on Friday Fuel, but I want to break down like what the tech stack costs for starting, like startup tech, tech stack: Shopify, $39 a month. Payroll, $0 for your first 10, $9 after that. Klaviyo starts at $0, $20 a month after that. Um, shipping in Shopify, $0. ShipStation, $9.99. Project management, Trello, Asana, the bonus tech item I gave you, $0. So your estimate is about $50 to $80 a month depending on where you land with free versus paid. And then you're going to have transaction fees on that. So when you think about it, it's not overwhelming. It's not going to cost you thousands of dollars to get started unless you need to hire something out. But you can literally get your tech stack started for less than $100 a month, and that's pretty incredible. So before you launch, take time to get that tech stack dialed in. It doesn't have to be fancy. It just needs to work. Check your tools. Double-check your, your setup and test it like a customer. Don't let tech be the reason you lose sales or momentum. And hey, if you need help, it's okay. You don't get bonus points for doing everything yourself. Just keep it simple, launch strong, and let's go get those subscribers.