Swell

Building subscription pricing for everyone

Today's merchants rely on a series of expensive third-party applications to manage their subscription products. Recognizing a market gap, we saw an opportunity to build our own solution into the Swell platform with no additional fees for our users.

Some things you already know

Subscriptions often pose a significant challenge for merchants, a concern that resonates throughout the e-commerce industry. Pricing for subscription products is a recurring topic in our discussions with customers, largely due to its widespread adoption as the primary third-party commerce tool. Many merchants rely on multiple third-party applications and integrations to manage their storefronts, leading to rapidly accumulating costs.

Beyond the financial aspect, merchants frequently express frustration with the current solutions, which often act as bottlenecks in their operations. Managing subscription products typically involves utilizing separate platforms, disrupting workflow and hindering efficiency for merchants.

Taking a piece of the pie

Recognizing a market gap, we seized the opportunity to develop subscription pricing tools integrated directly into our platform. Our aim was to create seamless, user-friendly subscription functionality within Swell, alleviating merchant frustrations without imposing extra costs on our customers.

Mapping our solution

Subscription functionality is integral to every aspect of the platform, intricately intertwined with orders, customers, carts, and more. It was imperative to ensure that our user experience encompassed all of these touchpoints. For instance, customers' subscriptions can be accessed either through the full list of subscriptions  or directly from the customer profile. Our focus primarily revolved around crafting wireframes and flows for individual functions and their ripple effects on other areas.

✨ The Design ✨

Subscription pricing is configured in the same location as standard product pricing, creating immediate familiarity with merchants. Multiple plans can be configured with their own intervals, pricing, trial days, and usage limits.

Subscriptions are activated by processing orders containing subscription enabled products. This can be done manually by the merchant in the dashboard, or by the customer when placing an order through a storefront.

The merchant is provided a view of all subscriptions. The collection can be filtered by product, plan, customer, and date of creation.

Each subscription displays the plan, invoices, and orders it has created. The merchant can make changes to billing and shipping or take action such as pausing or cancellation.

Things we learned along the way

Shortly after our initial launch, we quickly received feedback regarding order fulfillment. Merchants often needed to fulfill orders created by subscriptions at different intervals than the billing schedule. In response, we added an additional feature providing the ability to control fulfillment schedules.

Merchants can enable additional fields that set the subscription order interval at a different time than the billing schedule.

The results

Swell Subscriptions launched on Product Hunt as the #5 product of the day and currently stands at 412 community votes. As our new offering is still in its early stages, we are unable to perform quantitative platform metrics analysis at this time. However, individual user sentiment and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The current plan is to monitor user growth in relation to the launch of subscriptions and the number of storefronts that incorporate subscription pricing plans into their storefronts.