The Girlfriend Doctor, a US based store, shifted their entire subscriber base to Loop Subscriptions with the help of a well planned migration process.

“In my 20 years of experience in customer success- trust me when I say I’ve been through a lot of integrations and migrations, this is the smoothest migration of my life. No hiccups at all!"
Edith Terolli
Customer Experience Manager, Dr. Anna Cabeca
Published on
17 September 2023

About The Girlfriend Doctor

The Girlfriend Doctor® is owned and run by Dr. Anna Cabeca. Dr. Anna is a well-known Triple-Board Certified OB-GYN. Dr Anna has published 2 bestsellers: The Hormone Fix and Keto-Green 16. She also runs her show here and runs a blog here.


Through this brand, she has worked with thousands of women one-on-one to help them understand and improve their health and manage their hormones. She is the first call for women who have questions they would be comfortable asking only their girlfriend. On their store, you can find all types of products related to women's health and wellness and skin care: Supplements, Creams, Detox Bundles, Courses and more.

The Migration story

The Girlfriend Doctor® is part of the health, wellness and supplements industry and a large portion of their customers are subscribers. They had been running subscriptions on their store for the last couple of years and have a considerable subscriber base. As the subscribers started increasing, so did the problems.

Subscribers started complaining about not being able to manage their subscriptions, they were not able to login to the customer portal and in some-cases subscriptions didn't even get created.

Given the scale of their operations, they were skeptical about doing a migration. However, customer (subscriber) experience was getting impacted a lot, they decided to migrate and started exploring other platforms that were alternatives to Bold Commerce in late 2021.

Andreas, technology manager at The Girlfriend Doctor®, started exploring alternatives to Bold Subscriptions (also compared Recharge vs Bold).
He nearly finalised Skio when we reached out to him. Andreas wasn’t very keen to explore other platforms.

But we started speaking and answered his queries in detail on chat. He was impressed with our detailed (and quick) responses and even recommendations. So we asked him to try out app on a demo store.

He was highly impressed with our feature set- great customer experience on our subscriber portal and dashboards with every possible data point on subscriptions. And that’s it! Andreas made-up his mind to migrate from Bold to Loop Subscriptions.

1. Custom checkout for subscriptions

Customers had to complete their subscription orders on the external checkout page and this resulted in drop offs at the last stage of payments and led to revenue loss along with poor customer experience. This was also a nightmare from the point of view of analytics as they had to analyze drop-off numbers on two different domains.

2. Unintuitive customer portal.

Customers found it difficult to access the subscriber portal and manage their subscriptions. Customers had to create a separate account which was confusing so they started raising tickets. This high barrage of tickets started taking the bandwidth of customer experience team. This led to poor customer experience.

3. Lack of integration with Gorgias

The Girlfriend Doctor® used Gorgias, a popular customer support Shopify app. They were already getting a lot of customer tickets and Bold doesn't integrate with Gorgias which created more problems for them (our integration with Gorgias helped them to reduce support tickets later on)

We ended-up doing the integration in a week’s time. Andreas wasn’t expecting this at all and he said:

"You guys are great! Thanks for these frequent updates and apologies that currently we are as fast you!"


4. Very high response time and slow customer support.

The Bold Subscriptions team took anywhere from 48-72 hours to respond to a support ticket. This slow response time meant higher resolution time for end customer as well which led to extremely poor response. Slow response time combined with increasing tickets started becoming unmanageable situation for CX team.

Risk-Free Migration Process

Andreas is a technical person and he thinks about edge cases first: Possible problems which can happen with the migration.

We also follow the same philosophy. For every migration to our Shopify subscriptions app, we create an extensive document outlining all details.

To shift the complete subscriber base of Dr. Anna through a 100% risk-free migration, we made a comprehensive 3-phase migration plan. To ease the migration process, we request access of Shopify store so we could do the heavy-lifting.

In phase 1, we launched the Loop Subscription Widget on their online store. Within phase 2, we migrated the payment details of the subscribers. And in the phase 3, we migrated all the subscribers to a different payment provider.


We installed Loop Subscriptions on a test Shopify Store and completed the set-up as per our document. Andreas and team also worked on setting-up custom subscription widget which would result in an increase in subscribers.

subscription widget on Dr Anna's website
Subscription Widget with customized selling plan

Here are the important configurations that need to be done in a migration:

  1. Creation of selling plans and mapping products
  2. Shipping Profiles for Subscriptions: The Girlfriend Doctor® has different shipping profiles for subscriptions and one-time orders. They also have different shipping profiles for different geographies so all of this was set-up.
  3. Subscription Update Logic: If the product price changes, then it shouldn’t impact existing subscriptions. This is a simple configuration.
  4. Easy Customer Por
  5. tal: We created a dedicated page where the customers just need to enter their email to get a link for the subscriber portal. We also added a button in My Account section of Shopify so customers can also access subscription portal from there.



Setting up actions inside customer portal
Simple and Easy-to-Use Customer Portal

5. Smart Dunning Management and Alerts: We setup a payment retry logic for failed payments and also activated alerts for customers to update their cards. This has already resulted in 3.8% increase in revenue.

failed vs realised revenue trend through Loop's dunning management
Get Analytics on Potential Revenue from Payment Retries

6. Cancellation Flow: When customer tries to cancel the subscription, we setup a system to ask for a reason. Every reason has few recommendations to reduce cancellations

cancellation flows inside Loop
Reduce subscription cancellations through customized flows

Smooth migration of Payments gateway

When The Girlfriend Doctor® was on another app, they were using Stripe for recurring billing. Now they wanted to switch to Authorize.net for subscriptions because their main store also ran on the same payment gateway. This is how we planned the process:

  • We set-up Stripe as secondary payment gateway on Shopify Store to process existing subscribers and migrated all the payment tokens.
  • All new subscriptions were getting created on Authorize.net
  • Once the migration of all subscribers was done (phase 3), we started migrating payment methods from Stripe to Authorize.net.

All of this was done without notifying or alerting the customers.


Smooth migration of Subscribers

Once Stripe was activated on the store and we had migrated all the payment tokens, we started migrating all the subscribers to Loop. We migrated few subscribers to see everything is working well. After testing thoroughly for any issues, we completed the entire migration. While the migration was happening, we also enabled Gorgias integration to help customer experience team resolve issues better.

review by The Girlfriend Doctor on Shopify app store
Review on Shopify App Store From Dr. Anna Cabeca's Team

Steps Forward

After super smooth migration, we are now working with Andreas and Edith to help them reduce cancellations and increase subscribers. In our first call post migration to discuss new ideas subscription growth, Edith said:

"This call has been really valuable for us. You guys are really good at what you do, I can tell you that. For how long you have been doing this?"


On their store, you can easily observe that they have prominently highlighted special offers on subscription orders. That’s a great tactic to increase the conversion rate of customers to subscribers. 


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