How Supplement First grew its subscription take rate by 53%

TL;DR

• Supplement First is a family-owned retailer of practitioner-grade supplements. Its old widget couldn’t make subscription the default without people subscribing by accident.
• On Loop, the brand put subscriber benefits up front, made subscription the default, and added an upgrade to subscription offer at checkout for one-time buyers.
• In the six months after the switch, it measured a 53% lift in its subscription acquisition rate, with monthly churn averaging under 5%.
• Brand-matched portal add-ons grew roughly 4x year over year, and a smarter payment recovery strategy lifted first-cycle recovery about 30%.

About Supplement First

Supplement First has sold professional-grade vitamins and supplements online since 2010. The family-run store in Cornelius, North Carolina, is an authorized retailer for dozens of practitioner brands, from Pure Encapsulations and Thorne to Nordic Naturals and Integrative Therapeutics, and its customers rate it 4.9 out of 5 across 22,000+ reviews.

People take these products every day, usually on a practitioner’s advice, so subscription is a natural fit. The catch: as a retailer of other companies’ brands, Supplement First runs on thin margins. It can’t buy loyalty with deep discounts, so its subscriptions have to win on convenience.

The challenge: customers were signing up as subscribers by accident

Subscribe-by-default worked, until it didn’t

Two of the brand’s biggest competitors preselect subscription on their product pages, so Kevin Elliott tested it. Sign-ups more than doubled. But many of those new subscribers hadn’t meant to subscribe. The brand switched back to one-time as the default.

“…that tells me they're not really even paying attention to that widget, they're just buying whatever is already selected.”
Kevin Elliott - on a call with Loop before switching

That was the real lesson. The widget was the lever, but only if it made the choice obvious, and his old setup didn’t allow much customization.

One-time buyers kept scrolling past the subscription upgrade link

Shoppers who picked one-time saw an upgrade-to-subscription text link in their order summary. It was easy to miss. Kevin had already seen a bigger, clearly framed upgrade box do far better, and wanted that at checkout.

“It's working a lot better than those links in the product summary.”
Kevin Elliott - on a prominent checkout upgrade box versus small text links

The solution: make saying yes to a subscription easy, at every step

When Supplement First went live on Loop, Loop handled the subscriber migration. From there, Kevin and Loop’s customer success manager worked down the funnel in their monthly reviews: product page, then checkout, then everything after sign-up.

✓ Loop’s out-of-the-box widget made subscription benefits the hero, and subscribing the obvious choice

“…if we can call out more attention to that widget, we can get more people to buy…”
Kevin Elliott - on a call with Loop before switching

Supplement First set up Loop’s out-of-the-box subscription widget and made the benefits the hero, up front instead of behind a click: the saving on today’s order and every shipment after, plus a plain “skip, delay or cancel any time.” Subscriber discounts vary by brand, so they’re mapped to Shopify collections, and new products pick up the right discount automatically. Once shoppers could see what they were choosing, the brand made subscription the default again.

✓ Loop’s checkout upgrade offer turned one-time buyers into subscribers

For shoppers who still chose one-time, the brand added Loop’s checkout upgrade offer. It sits at the top of the checkout, shows the saving in dollars, lets the shopper pick a delivery frequency, and converts the order with one click.

✓ In the portal, add-ons from the brand each subscriber already buys

Once someone subscribes, the next chance to grow the order is their customer portal. Supplement First’s customers are loyal to practitioner brands, not just products, so the portal recommends add-ons by brand: a Pure Encapsulations subscriber sees other Pure Encapsulations staples. 

In January 2026 they layered brand-based recommendations on top of the general recommendations, and add-on revenue kept climbing every quarter. By Q3 2026 it was roughly 4x what it had been a year earlier. Add-ons’ share of the brand’s subscription revenue grew about 2.5x, so a growing part of every renewal now comes from products subscribers chose to add on their own.

✓ A smarter payment recovery strategy saw 30% lift in recovery rate

The last step: making sure renewals actually go through. Supplement First sends a card-update quick action link when a payment fails: one-click takes the subscriber directly to the portal to update their card, no login needed. No discount is attached, and the brand reports more than 60% of recipients complete the card update action. In 2026, card updates drove about two-thirds of its recovered first-cycle payments.

With its CSM, the brand also increased the number of dunning retries over time, checking at each step that first-attempt payment success held steady (it stayed at 94–96%). As retries went up, so did recovery: first-cycle payment recovery climbed from about 42% to about 56%, a ~30% relative lift.

The results: more subscribers, and they stayed

Supplement First compared the six months after subscription became the default with the six months before:

• 53% higher subscription acquisition rate. New subscribers rose about 41%, even though the pool of non-subscribed customers shrank around 8%.
• Churn held. Monthly churn averaged under 5%, in line with where it was before. The extra sign-ups stayed.
• 2.2x active subscribers since the brand’s first month on Loop.

• ~4x portal add-on revenue year over year, with add-ons’ share of subscription revenue up about 2.5x.
• ~30% lift in first-cycle payment recovery, from about 42% to 56%, while first-attempt success held steady.

Results reflect Supplement First’s measured experience; outcomes vary by brand, vertical, product, and implementation.

Takeaways for DTC operators

• Only default to subscription once the widget explains it. Shoppers take what’s preselected, so the preselected option has to show its terms.
• Ask one-time buyers again, louder. A text link is easy to miss. An offer at the top of checkout isn’t.
• Fix failed payments before you discount. Retries and no-login card updates cost nothing per subscriber.