We only sell our subscription box on our main website - This is why!

A common question I have received over the years is why we don’t sell other dog products on our main BusterBox website and only focus on our subscription box. It’s a great question, and in this episode, I break down our entire thought process behind this.

We do sell many other products, but not on the front of our website. Our main focus is our subscription box, and the other products are sold on the back end. This is for a few different reasons. Check out this episode to understand our full strategy and learn how this can be applied to your business.

If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the free Facebook group to post your question there.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope you're having a fantastic day. On today's episode, we are discussing my thoughts on selling other products on your website apart from your subscription box your main website, that is. A question came in during the week in relation to this. I picked it out because I think this is going to help a lot of people. Anyway, let me read out the question.

Speaker 2: 1:09

I'm really interested in understanding why you don't sell any other dog products on your BusterBoxcom website. You seem to only sell your subscription box and that's it. Are you not missing out on a lot of additional sales by not offering any other products? I'm really curious about this. Thanks, okay, I've got a lot of questions about this over the years.

Speaker 2: 1:38

The reason why we currently don't offer any other products on our busterboxcom website is our subscription box is our main priority. We want to grow our subscription box revenue and that's where we make the majority of our money from, and it has the highest ltv by far out of all the different products. We actually do sell on the backend, and my thoughts on it would be if you offer too many products, you are essentially creating distractions which can potentially lower your conversion rate and drive up your customer acquisition cost. Imagine we sold loads of different products on our main buster box website. Say, we sold our subscription box and we sold dog food, and we sold different dog toys and dog treats individually, and we sold collars and leashes and all these different products. Well, what would happen would be somebody would be scrolling facebook and they would see an ad for our subscription box. Okay, we may have an ad running, say, if you sign up, you get a free dog bed and they click on it with the intention of going over to our website and signing up to a six-month subscription, which would be very profitable for us. But then all these different products pop up before they enter their credit card and they're like oh, I'm going to get the subscription, but will I grab a dog leash? Am I going to grab some additional treats? Am I going to grab some other dog products? Oh, I'm really confused. This is taking a lot of time. I'm gone, I'm leaving the website, I'm not signing up for anything. Somebody knocked on my door and I'm distracted and I never completed the transaction, whereas if you only offer the subscription box, they basically come over to the website and there's a narrow path to the destination, and the narrow path is they go down the sign up flow, they put in information about their dog and they complete the purchase, essentially giving you the best chance of getting them on to the subscription and getting the highest lifetime value from them. And that's my thoughts on it right now.

Speaker 2: 4:12

Every business is different. There are examples out there of subscription boxes that aren't focusing so much on the box, and they do sell other products through their main website, but for us, our main focus is the box. We're a subscription first business and we want to do everything in our power to get as many people as possible to sign up to our subscription box. Now, does that mean we do not sell any other products at all and the only thing we offer is a box? No, it doesn't mean that at all. That would actually be very foolish if we never sold any other products apart from our subscription box. We have a database of dog lovers who want to buy more products for their dogs, and if we never gave them the opportunity to do that, yeah, we definitely believe money on the table because they just go to other websites or other retailers to buy more products. We just don't offer any of these products on the front end, because we don't want to harm our conversion rate and we want to get as many people as possible signed up to our subscription. When somebody signs up, though, we then have other products for sale on the back end, and we will actually start trying to sell more products immediately through our post-purchase upsells. We sell other subscriptions, like extra toys, extra treats and some other products, and a large percentage of our user base buy more products from us immediately through those post-purchase upsells. Now, like I mentioned, we are a subscription first business, and our main priority is getting people on our subscription, and sending people to a web page with a million different products probably would not make any business sense for us.

Speaker 2: 6:13

Now, when I'm talking about a page with loads of different products, I'm talking about a typical shopify store, and I actually came across some information on the internet about the average conversion rate for a typical Shopify store. Now, this information was picked up on burstcommercecom. Let me just read out some of it here. What is the average Shopify conversion rate? The average Shopify conversion rate is 1.4%. If your store has a conversion rate of 0.2% or lower, it will put your store in the bottom 20% of all Shopify stores. Keep in mind that this is just the average. Your shop's conversion rate will vary based on your shoppers, what you sell and how you optimize your Shopify store, which is very true. You can obviously have a much higher conversion rate than 1.4. But what I'm taking from that is there is a lot of shopify stores that don't convert very well, and I think that's because they are set up in a way where there's a load of different products and there is no clear destination. It's just people being sent to a webpage and there are so many options. It creates distractions and customers don't know what to buy, and that's why the conversion rate is low. I can tell you now our average conversion rate is a lot higher than 1.4%.

Speaker 2: 7:52

But going back on the previous point, we do sell other products to our subscribers. It's just not true that name buster box website and we've a few different ways of selling other products to our subscribers. The first way I obviously covered already, and that's our post-purchase upsells, and they kick in immediately as soon as somebody signs up. Another way, which drives a considerable amount of revenue for us, will be through a standalone online store that we operate, buster Box Store, and we sell many other one-time dog products in this store. We sell leashes, we sell collars, we sell other toys, other treats and we do particularly well around special occasions like Christmas, where we will sell themed hampers and themed standalone boxes.

Speaker 2: 8:45

Now we are not spending any money on marketing to drive traffic to this standalone store. This is all done on the back end. We send our existing customers to this standalone store and we also send the leads that we pick up, mainly through our selling up flow, to this standalone store and that way it's all profit. We've no marketing cost associated with any of these sales. We obviously have to pay for shipping and fulfillment and the product cost, but the rest is profit. Now this works really, really well for us because we don't have to worry about the marketing numbers working in our favor to actually produce a profit, because it would more than likely be impossible to sell, say, a dog leash at scale through paid marketing and actually make the numbers work in your favor, unless you did a lot of upsells or something. So yeah, it's all profit for us and it works great.

Speaker 2: 9:43

Now the other channel we use to sell more products to our subscribers is the actual box itself. We do particularly well with add-ons, and a lot of this is driven through our reply yes process. I've recorded a podcast in detail about the reply yes process, so you should definitely check that out if you want to hear more about this in detail. I also released some training around it earlier on in the year, called the subscription box cash machine, which literally covers everything we do in buster box, including email templates, and the people who actually purchased that training I was speaking to some of them recently have produced amazing results from it. They've generated a lot of extra revenue. But yeah, the reply yes process is highly effective for us. We basically send out an email and give our customers the opportunity to add more products to their box by just replying yes. That's simply it now.

Speaker 2: 10:46

I hope that answered your question in detail. I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I hope you understand now why we don't sell other products on the BusterBox website. This is what we do. I'm not saying this is right for every single subscription box company. Different companies have different goals when it comes to selling products and maybe at some point in the future we may switch things up as well and test something different, but up until now this has been working really well for us. Now we'll be back next week at the exact same time as always. If you have a question you want answered on the podcast, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom and join the free facebook group and post your question there. We'll chat to you next week.