How do you run a meal kit subscription on Shopify?

What makes a meal kit subscription hard to run?

Three things a plain subscribe and save setup doesn’t cover:

• The menu changes. Customers expect new dishes every week, and a fixed product on a fixed schedule can’t express that.
• The kitchen needs a deadline. You buy ingredients and plan production for a number of boxes. Changes after that point are expensive.
• Not everyone picks. Some customers forget to choose their meals for a week. Charging them for a box they didn’t fill leads to cancellations, and shipping a random box leads to complaints.

How do customers choose their meals?

With a build-a-box subscription. Customers subscribe to one box, and the dishes they pick go into each order. They fill their first box on the product page before checkout, then fill every upcoming box in the customer portal, several weeks ahead if they like.

Box sizes are variants of the box, each with its own number of dishes or a minimum order value, so a box for two and a box for four sit side by side. Customers can add paid extras on top if you offer them. You can even make the sign-up free, so the first real box is the first charge.

Keep the jump from the first box to the regular price small. A deep first-box discount wins sign-ups, but subscribers who joined for the discount often cancel at the first full charge. They call it too expensive, when the real problem was the jump.

How do you change the menu every week?

You decide which dishes are on the menu in which weeks. Customers only see the dishes for the week they are filling, while staples such as breakfast or desserts stay available every week. You can preview each week’s menu before it goes live, so you see what customers will see.

If you run two programs from one catalog, such as a family box and a fitness box, each subscription plan can offer its own menu.

How does your kitchen get final numbers on time?

Three things work together:

• One billing day. Every subscriber bills on the same weekday, whenever they signed up.
• A cutoff for late sign-ups. A cutoff moves orders placed shortly before billing into the following week, so a new subscriber isn’t charged twice in a few days.
• A deadline for changes. A set number of days before billing, customers can no longer change their box. From then on, the order is final.

The Inventory Planner then adds up what your active subscriptions will need in the coming weeks, including skips and one-off changes, so you can buy ingredients from real orders.

What happens when a customer skips a week or picks nothing?

Customers skip a week themselves in the portal, or pause for a few weeks if you offer pausing. When they don’t pick anything, Zubs skips the box instead of charging it. The portal warns them while a box is below your minimum, so they can still fill it in time.