Subscription Box Business 101: A Beginner’s Guide

With the onset of subscription-based business models, the businesses have recently seen a prevailing tide of revitalizing and recurring revenue with more opportunities for business expansion and customer loyalty. Subscription businesses are booming and businesses from all the niches and industries are incorporating it into their business model in one or another way. No matter if you are in B2B or dealing with B2C product- or service-based ventures, Subscription-based business models are widening the new horizons of not only maintaining and managing but also growing the revenue a hundredfold.

To extend the customer lifecycle for a prolonged period so that they can stay loyal to your products or services, subscription business has also introduced the idea of a niche-specific subscription box services. It isn’t a new concept, but its novelty comes from the mystery of its contents when revealed after every interval by the customer. It can never get outdated as it fuels some of the most stimulating emotions, such as curiosity, excitement, surprise, and pleasure, in an individual while fulfilling their needs or wants.

In this guide, we will walk you through the different but basic aspects of the subscription box services and how you can start the subscriptions-based business, strategize its workflow and operations, reach out to the customers, and above all, how you can manage the subscription box billing. Let’s begin.

First Things First,

What is a Subscription Box?

A Subscription Box is a box that contains a hodgepodge of the products or items of the same niche or theme that would be delivered to the customer’s doorstep after every decided interval for the length of the subscription.

A subscription box can be conceived on almost every niche from self-care or beauty products to garments and wardrobe accessories to pet food and accessories to medicines and food boxes to books and mobile phone accessories to anything that one may require depending on their needs and interests after every interval with a touch of variety and feasibility.

Some subscription box services even allow their customers to personalize their boxes themselves as they want or need.

Subscription boxes can be of various types, including

Sample Products Subscription Boxes
Seasonal Subscription Boxes
Dedicated Subscription Boxes
Personalized Subscription Boxes
And Others

What is a Subscription Box Business?

Subscription Box Business deals with delivering the Subscription Boxes with the assorted products related to the same theme to the customers at their homes against a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription fee.

No matter you operate online, offline, or both, anyone including traders, retailers, dealers, merchants, or even freelancers working from home running grocery, beauty, or pharmaceutical stores, garment, toys, handicrafts, stationery, ornaments, jewelry, food, hardware, IT hardware, pets, sanitary, or any other type of products-based business can step into the Subscription Box Services and grow their recurring revenue and retain their customers on any scale.

How Does It Work?

Once you have decided your niche and figure out the way to get the products for your Subscription Box, the next thing is all about providing an extraordinary Subscription Box as a business.

An impressive Subscription Box appears with a combination of few operations:

Conceiving the Subscription Box Idea
Designing the Subscription Box—Appearance, Products Assortment, Placement Within Container, and Personalized Amazements i.e. Notes, Coupons, Surprise Gifts, and many more.
Reaching out to the customers through marketing, advertising, and PR
Selling the charm of Subscription Boxes
Managing the Seamless Subscriptions Affairs and Subscription Box Billing
Punctual Delivery of the Subscription Box to the Customer throughout the length of the Subscription

How Can I Start the Subscription Box Services?

Depending on your current status, you need to make arrangements to kick start your subscription box services. If you are already a trader, retailer, merchant, or manufacturer, all you need is to use your resources and devise a subscription business strategy from Subscription box pricing and plans formulation to boxing, marketing, delivery, and subscriber’s personal or payment details and billing management.

For others, first of all, you need to discover ways to access to the theme or niche-specific products. Based on the niche, you may manufacture the items, buy the products, or can become a retailer. The further steps to become a subscription box services provider, you can follow the steps to establish the business and customer base:

Kickstart the business with Prototype Subscription Box with a pre-launch pocket-friendly subscription plans
Make Shipment Arrangements
Create a website, social media pages, or an e-commerce shop
Market through social media, search engine, and influencer
Subscribe to an easy, simple, and extensible Subscription Management SaaS Platform
Start taking orders from near-by customers and deliver the Subscription Boxes personalized for them
With the identification of market and customers needs, expand the net of Subscriptions and fully launch the Subscription Box Business
Auto-manage the Subscription operations and Subscription Box Recurring Billing with one of the best-budgeted and highly flexible Subscription Management Software, SubscriptionFlow

Why Do I Need SubscriptionFlow to Manage Subscription Box Billing?

To automate subscription management, recurring billing, and payment processing
To auto-manage monthly subscription pricing as per the changes occurred due to shuffling of products
To auto-incorporate the coupons, customer discounts, and promotional offers in billing
To auto-enable the tax management
To automate the payment retries through smart dunning
To set the subscription box products catalog and the subscription pricing and plans features through smart modules powered by Artificial Intelligence
To reduce the operational costs of accounting, billing, support, and subscriber base management
To empower your subscriber to update the personal or payment information, upgrade, downgrade, or even cancel the subscription plans, personalize the assortment of the products in the box, send feedback or complain emails or receive payment status or recurring billing reminders, and do more with their self-service portal. Any update in the customer portal will automatically get updated in your client’s portal in real-time so your operations run smoothly and stay updated.
To integrate other third-party applications to streamline the billing, sales, marketing, customer care, and other RevOps across the board
To review the real-time subscription metrics through the dedicated dashboard integrated with the user-friendly and responsive Client Portal and Billing UI
To monitor the Monthly or Annual Recurring Revenue, Churn Rate, or Leakage in Revenue
To check the payment statuses of the subscribers
To get the present, past, and future projections of the recurring revenue in run-time