Shark Tank is a long-running show on ABC where entrepreneurs describe their businesses to a group of seasoned and successful business owners, or “sharks.” The entrepreneurs’ goal is to impress the sharks so they will invest and partner with the business.
On a recent episode the owners of a subscription holiday decor box company named Ready Festive pitched the sharks on their holiday decor subscription box company. I work with several subscription box companies who use WooCommerce so I was excited to discover Ready Festive’s site uses WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions!
In this post I will describe the products offered by this subscription box company, the WooCommerce Setup, and some possible ways to improve the site.
Types of WooCommerce Products Offered
Let’s dig in to how the product catalog is setup and how products are sold to customers. There are different strategies on how to bundle products or how to sell recurring subscriptions.
Subscription Boxes
Ready Festive offers three sizes of subscription boxes: Mini Box, Standard Box, and Deluxe Box. Their FAQ page describes the boxes and shows examples of products included in the different sizes. It is a simple setup where if you pay more you will receive more decor.
Single Purchase Boxes
Selling a subscription box for a single purchase is great for stores where customers who have already received a box can buy extra, or customers who signed up after a box was offered can purchase past boxes. Single purchases are also a great way to sell excess inventory at full or discounted prices.
Ready Festive has boxes and single products for sale in their shop section.
Gift a Box
Customers can gift one box or a subscription of boxes to someone else. The process for signing up for a gift subscription is the same as a subscription box, but the gift giver can add the gift recipient’s physical address under Shipping Details on the checkout page.
The gift giver is charged for renewals, but the gift recipient can manage box selection. I did not verify this feature because I did not purchase a subscription box.
WooCommerce Subscriptions Site Features
Theme
The site is using a custom theme that contains some elements from Storefront, but is not a direct child theme.
Hosting
The site uses CloudWays for hosting and Cloudflare as a CDN.
Payment Gateway
The site uses both Braintree and PayPal to collect payment for orders.
Subscription On Boarding
The site uses a custom developed subscription on boarding wizard that guides customers through selecting holidays and sizes. Each holiday size combo probably ties back to a WooCommerce simple product, or variable product with two attributes. This makes it easy to track SKUs for fulfillment.
Side note: I love subscription on boarding wizards! They are fun to custom code and provide a way to add custom messaging and build anticipation as the customer works through the steps. After the customer builds a box they have a feeling of connection to the selections they have made and this motivates them to complete the purchase.
Customers add a minimum of three holidays and sizes with a maximum of 14 boxes. The communication on the process is clear and the custom wizard looks good on mobile and desktop.
WooCommerce Subscriptions for recurring billing
When the customer completes the wizard their selected boxes are setup in the cart with quantity of one, price set for the box size, and a renewal date in the future corresponding to the selected holiday. The initial order is always $0.00, and the renewal will charge in the future.
As I stated at the beginning of the article Ready Festive’s site is using WooCommerce Subscriptions to manage customer subscriptions.
With WooCommerce Subscriptions and certain payment gateways customer payment details are stored in the payment gateway and can be used by renewal payments. WooCommerce Subscriptions handles all renewal scheduling. This gives the store owner control over updating subscription details like charge date and charged amount.
WooCommerce includes the Action Scheduler which is the behind-the-scenes engine that makes setting future charges up so easy!
After the customer has selected boxes each box type ordered is setup as a separate annual subscription so the customer will have multiple subscriptions tied to a holiday.
Possible ways to improve the site
Here are some things I would suggest as possible improvements to this site.
Split out shipping into a line item
Include shipping cost as a separate line item, or bake it in. The mini box costs “$69.00 plus shipping” then at checkout after adding Billing Address the price changes to $79.00. I assume the extra $10.00 is for shipping, but it is unclear if this is the case.
Add Toolbox Features
I didn’t purchase a subscription so am not sure how customers manage subscriptions. We install Toolbox for WooCommerce Subscriptions to sites to quickly add several powerful features for customers to manage their WooCommerce subscriptions.
Because of the way Ready Festive’s catalog is setup and their promise of being able to edit subscriptions they probably have some custom code to allow customers to switch box sizes on the holidays through a dropdown for each separate subscription.
Conclusion
Ready Festive’s site is polished and a great sales platform for their unique and curated home decor products. Ready Festive’s owners made a deal with Shark Robert and I expect their success to skyrocket in the future!
If you own a WooCommerce store and would like to explore any of these WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscription ideas for your own site, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Happy Selling!
Note: this is not a sponsored post and is an observation of how the listed website is built based on our experience as WooCommerce experts. There was no site intrusion or any nefarious practices employed in collecting this information.