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LinkedIn posts or Tweets asking for Recharge alternatives are becoming a common occurrence these days. With more subscription app options available now, brands are confident about migrating away from Recharge Legacy. However, a question arises: Which is the right app for a large-scale established brand?
Livingood Daily, with ~130K subscriber base, faced the same dilemma back in 2022. They explored and tried all the options in the Shopify ecosystem before migrating to Loop from Recharge Legacy.
(Note: Livingood Daily have migrated twice to Loop- Once on Shopify and the next time from Checkout Champs to Shopify. More details at the end of the case study)
Livingood Daily is a very popular supplements brand with a very loyal base. In terms of subscription program setup, they offer a complex mix of both physical product and digital subscriptions to their customer base. Most of it is single SKU autoship with premade bundles available for subscription
Livingood Daily is a founder-led brand in the truest self. Dr. Blake Livingood actively participates in every decision for the growth of the brand.
That’s why when his team started facing issues with Recharge, he finalised the decision to migrate subscribers to another subscriptions app.
Livingood Daily faced a range of challenges that top supplement brands should not face with the right subscriptions partner:
Livingood Daily was not getting the ideal customer support from Recharge- Slow, unavailable at important times and sharing canned responses to specific questions.
For large-scale brands such as Livingood Daily, bad support is a major concern.
Recharge Legacy doesn’t have a very customizable cancellation flow. Brands can’t configure their own alternative actions, build HTML-based retention campaigns without the help of developers, and can’t offer one-time discounts to specific subscriber segments
Livingood Daily subscriber base were not able to do basic tasks such as skip, pause or cancel subscription inside the Recharge customer portal as they were not able to understand the user interface.
To get their tasks completed, they would raise tickets with the Livingood Daily support team. This led to a high volume of support tickets related to subscriptions adding to the workload of the CX team.
Subscription orders were processed on a third party checkout URL in Recharge Legacy.
This caused confusion for new subscribers as drop-off rate after adding subscription to cart was high. It was also difficult to track visitor journey across domains which would make conversion rate analysis difficult as an ecommerce store.
Recharge lacked the ability to offer certain discounts inside cancellation flow based on an individual subscriber journey. It became difficult for Livingood Daily’s team to run retention campaign based on certain subscribers
We offered the Livingood Daily team a full fledged 14-day free trial of Loop Enterprise plan. They were impressed by our onboarding process, support, documentation and our product roadmap. As they operate at a massive scale, the Livingood Daily team stress tested Loop app during the trial.
They asked for custom integration with one of their marketing channels for subscriptions- ClickFunnels. We created and shared the entire integration flow between ClickFunnels, Loop and Shopify.
Also with this migration, they were saving almost 50% of what they were spending on Recharge.
After discussing internally and evaluating all the options in the market, they decided to switch over to Loop. And then we shared the migration plan with them
In every migration project, we create a personalized migration plan for the brand. We divide the plan into phases and also share estimated timelines.
We divided the migration into three major phases
We installed Loop on their Shopify store. Setup the widget (hardly took less than a day), customised Loop’s customer portal to match the brand colours and then also setup the necessary integrations- Klaviyo, Gorgias and others
- Took access to the Recharge API and used it to do a batch wise migration.
- We ensured that there are no double or missed charges.
- We ran backend scripts to bulk cancel the subscriptions using Recharge API
An additional complexity in case of this migration. ClickFunnels is a SaaS tool that helps to create a series of pages to improve the conversion rate from different marketing channels.
Livingood Daily team was using this tool to acquire more subscribers from paid channels.
Our task during the migration was to create new subscription orders from ClickFunnels inside Shopify admin using our APIs.
And we also imported all the subscriptions created in the past in ClickFunnels to Shopify admin. This did not affect the flow of one-time purchases from the ClickFunnels pages.
The entire migration process of Livingood Daily from Recharge to Loop took less than 3 weeks and was single-handedly undertaken by our team. No customer activity or communication was affected during the migration process.
Once all subscribers were migrated, Livingood Daily team used tags workflow inside Loop to categorise different types of subscriptions: Active, Cancelled or Paused.
The tags are required to show whether a subscription is active or cancelled inside the Loop’s customer portal.
After migration, we removed the Recharge subscription management link on their store and replaced it with our own portal login link.
We also created and shared a personalized onboarding checklist that was aimed towards setting up Loop to tackle their existing issues.
During the migration process, we realised that there were many duplicate subscription orders of the same subscriber. We merged those subscriptions into a single one to bring down the shipping costs for Livingood Daily.
How was this done? We identified subscribers with the same address and delivery frequency and then clubbed them together.
While on Recharge, Livingood Daily didn’t realise that they were losing revenue to failed card payments because it is not available natively.
After they migrated, they configured our inbuilt dunning solution to set up automatic payment retries to recover this revenue leak.
As soon as Livingood Daily switched over to Loop’s customer portal, they saw a decrease in the number of tickets related to subscriptions.
Livingood Daily was super impressed with our support during migration, onboarding and subscription growth campaigns. This is what they had to say:
A few months after migration from Recharge to Loop, Livingood Daily left the Shopify ecosystem and switched over to Checkout Champs. Our team assisted them completely during that migration.
Within 2 months, they realised that Checkout Champs wasn’t working out for them, so they migrated back to Shopify x Loop. During this particular migration, we also helped Livingood Daily with payment token migration from Checkout Champs to Stripe
We understand that payment migrations are always tough. That’s why we offer it as part of our free white-glove migration service.
To sum up the whole journey, we executed this large-scale migration of ~130K subscribers between different platforms, 4 times!
All these migrations were done successfully without any escalations, missed orders or double charges (usual nightmares when it comes migration)
After migrating to Loop, Livingood Daily has been able to grow their subscription revenue by ~40% as compared to the exact same period they were on Recharge.
They are also focussing a lot of their marketing activities on subscriptions now because they are confident about the upgraded experience of their customer portal on Loop.
The overall churn rate for Livingood Daily team dropped from ~10% to ~2% (after they shifted from Checkout Champs to Shopify x Loop).
How was this achieved? We worked with the Livingood Daily team to set up a relatable retention campaign inside our robust cancellation flows. Get the full story here
If you are still using Recharge, here is what Moiz Ali had to share in a Twitter thread
Loop is not just a subscriptions app. We are your subscriptions growth and retention partner. We work together with brands for long-term growth.We understand large-scale DTC brands require dedicated help and priority support. That’s why we offer a dedicated account manager, personal Slack setup, priority support for brands on our Enterprise plan.
Switching to Loop means switching to a Ferrari at a lower transaction cost 😉. Now that's a great online deal!
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