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When it comes to customization requirements, Shopify DTC brands come at a crossroads: Opt for a custom solution or find the right Shopify app to meet the requirements? The former is straightforward and expensive while the latter takes time but is easier to manage while saving money.
Lilac St also had to make this choice for managing box subscriptions on their Shopify store. Initially, they went the custom route, but it didn’t quite hit the mark. Then, after an exhaustive hunt for the right subscription solution, they found Loop, and had all their requirements met.
Lilac St shifted their subscription experience from a custom box subscriptions on Recharge to Loop Bundles. In this process, they migrated subscribers from a custom-made portal on Recharge to Loop’s robust subscription management portal.
Lilac St is a popular beauty brand known for its DIY eyelash extensions, operating on a monthly box subscription model.
Run by Alicia Weng, a former product manager at Google and Director of Operations at Pure Ventures, and Patrick Ellsworth, previously program manager at Tesla and software engineer at Google, Lilac St’s leadership understood the technical complexities involved in developing the right box subscription solution.
In their previous box subscription setup, they had a custom UI on their store built atop Recharge. They also had a custom portal for subscription management and were using Recharge Legacy as their checkout method.
Back in 2022, Lilac St migrated from Recharge Pro to Loop Enterprise.
First, they wanted to leverage the Native Shopify checkout for subscription orders.
Secondly, they didn’t want to move away from their custom UI design and used Loop’s APIs to power their subscription box orders on the native Shopify checkout. We collaborated with their team to ensure a seamless migration from Recharge to Loop.
Lilac St was also facing challenges with their old customer portal. So they rebuilt a new custom portal using Loop APIs.
These were some challenges Lilac St faced with their previous subscription provider.
Lilac St wanted to offer the ‘Buy more Save more’ subscription model in its store. In this model, the price drops as customers add more lash sets to their box order.
Old customer portal
New customer portal
Their previous solution could not handle staggered discounts in the bundle setup.
In addition to a custom bundles UI, Lilac St also had a custom-built portal for subscription management. However, this implementation resulted in a significant issue: each single bundle order was shown as different products inside their custom portal.
This left subscribers confused, and they were unsure how to make changes to the bundle product. It also made it difficult to make simple edits to the ongoing box subscription order, such as adding a new item, editing the quantities of items, and more.
And to make changes to the bundle order, they had to raise a ticket with the customer experience (CX) team. Over time, this led to a high volume of tickets related to subscription management, which could have been easily avoided with a better customer portal.
For any custom solution, brands need to integrate it with other essential apps. Lilac St's custom portal couldn't seamlessly integrate with critical Shopify apps like Gorgias for customer support and Stamped for loyalty programs. This raised concerns among the internal support team, who lacked centralized subscriber information and couldn't resolve tickets quickly due to the fragmented workflow across multiple apps.
Implementing new feature requirements for the custom solution involves extensive development work. The Lilac St team couldn't iterate or experiment rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck for long-term growth.
Maintaining this custom solution became frustrating, time-consuming, and resource-intensive, hindering their ability to scale efficiently.
Out of all of Loop’s features, these were the ones that stood out to the team at Lilac St.
Loop's range bundles allow brands to offer discounts without setting a maximum item limit in the cart. Brands can easily create different discount tiers based on the number of items added. For example, Lilac St. used Loop's range bundles to require a minimum of four items in the cart to get the bundled discount pricing.
Loop Bundles not only supports adding the main SKU but brands can also offer variants inside the bundles.
For every eyelash product, Lilac St has size variants: 16mm, 14mm, 12mm and 10mm.
Loop’s visual editor makes deep customizations possible without coding. Lilac St. used it to highlight how the tiered discounting model works. This helps in improving the conversion rate as they can easily make changes and run experiments on what messaging or layout works.
Loop Bundles was developed after carefully considering feedback and requirements from diverse DTC brands. This let us place robust checks on how bundles should function, surpassing custom solutions. We continuously improve our bundles with features that go beyond custom solutions.
For example, with custom setups, brands had to manually update bundle page images whenever changes occurred in the Shopify admin. Whereas Loop bundles fetches images, product descriptions, and details directly from the Shopify admin, massively reducing repetitive manual work.
With these capabilities, choosing Loop was a no-brainer. They decided to do an end-to-end migration, which unlocked a powerful customer portal.Loop already integrated with most Shopify apps so they didn’t have to worry about changing the rest of the tech stack. Let’s now dive into the migration process.
A box subscription involves multiple SKUs, so it’s not that straightforward to migrate. But our product specialist team has extensive experience in handling migrations. As with all migrations, we created a personalized plan for the Lilac St team.
We also refer to exhaustive migration checklists, which you can find below.
One of the issues with the custom solution was that there was no unique ID associated with a new bundle order. The custom solution was processing all the box subscriptions as just regular subscriptions of multiple items.
In Loop Bundles, multiple line items can be grouped under a single bundle ID.
So the first thing that we did as part of migration was add a Bundle ID to all the existing subscriptions.
Secondly, for any new box subscriptions now coming in via Loop, we created a new bundle transaction entry inside Loop and Shopify.
During migration, we also pay a special focus on discounts to not hamper the customer experience. In the custom setup, Lilac St was using manual Shopify discounts. During migration, we switched it over to Loop Bundle Discounts. We configured higher discounts as you add more items to the cart.
Once the migration was done, we helped the Lilac St team go live. This involves an onboarding checklist, including:
1. Making cart changes: CSS changes, proper error message implementation when the required cart quantity is not met, properly handle the quantity on the cart as on the live site
2. Bundles page styling: We worked with the Lilac team to make sure that Bundles UI matched the design language of the website.
3. Customer portal setup: Our customer portal is 100% customizable so we were easily able to match the styling to the Lilac St Store. They were easily able to make certain CSS changes to hide certain items that they did not want to show to subscribers.
4. Testing : Once we had done the migration and setup everything inside Loop, we did a comprehensive testing of the whole setup to ensure everything was working smoothly.
Within 11 months of implementing Loop’s bundle setup, Lilac St. saw a 72.7% increase in subscriptions revenue. Meanwhile, their total subscriptions activated grew by 55.2%.
During the migration, our team discovered fraudulent orders through a loophole in the custom setup's discount application, allowing higher discounts than intended. We promptly notified Lilac St for correction while safeguarding against such scenarios in Loop’s discount handling mechanisms.
Immediately after going live with the new UI, they saw a 13% increase in their conversion rate and total number of box orders processed.
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