A Guide to Start a Profitable Subscription Box Website

Getting Started with a Profitable Subscription Box Website

From the business owner’s perspective, a subscription box is a stable financial model which offers a recurring monthly income that is achievable in all niches. However, achieving success in the domain is not an easy task as there are several market players in the industry who have already got their footprints in different niche products. This makes the survival and triumph of new businesses tough and daunting. But that is possible.

Getting yourself started from the market research helps you identify the needs and expectations of your customers. With this, you would be able to understand how your customers view your business and what their expectations are. The detailed insights help you identify the pain points and preferences of your customers. You will get to know their buying patterns, demographics, market trends, and economic shifts. Using this data, you can create effective strategies that might be successful in building a subscription-based business.

Below we have listed the process in different steps that would help you in making prudent decisions and eventually starting up with a successful business.

Step 1: Setting up an Idea for Subscription Box Website

There are various categories of subscription boxes that you can choose from – fashion, art and culture, men’s luxury essentials, women’s daily wear, home and living, pets, food and drinks, fitness and outdoors, stationery, books, scent, perfume, and fragrance, toothcare, and more.

To get yourself started, identify your potential customers, talk to them, find their pain points, and identify the products in which they would be interested in; how these products would solve their problems, and tell them how your subscription box is different and unique from your competitors available in the marketplace.

You can even set up a questionnaire that would help you better understand your customers and select a subscription box suitable for them. These can be:

Who is the target audience?

What are the challenges that they face?

What do they do to resolve their challenges?

How can your subscription box help them?

What would be your USP?

The answers to these questions would help you in better understanding your customers, find out their problems, and resolving them in a unique and creative way. In the end, you would produce a unique idea that would help in resolving the problems of your customers.

Step 2: Setting up a price for your Subscription Box Website

Once you have an idea for the subscription box, the next step is to price it in a way that your subscription box is not much costly or cheap for your customers. It should be affordable and pocket-friendly to your customers.

There are various pricing strategies that one can opt for. It can be Skimming, Penetrative, High-Low pricing, Freemium, Predatory, Decoy, and Psychological, or Dynamic pricing. Selecting the right price strategy would help you maximize your profit and would help in retaining your customer base towards your brand.

While you select a pricing strategy, you must consider the various costs incurred – fixes costs, variable costs, operating costs, opportunity costs, direct costs, indirect costs, taxation, incremental costs, and other controllable and non-controllable costs.

Besides this, you need to have a look at your competitor’s pricing strategy and the cost at which their subscription boxes are available. Here, you must remember that you need to be competitive enough so that your potential customers choose you instead of your competitor.

Step 3: Marketing your Subscription Box Website

 

Marketing is one of the most important steps that allow your business to reach your potential customers. Even if you have a great idea and pricing plan with no customers, it would not be of any use. Marketing empowers you to reach to your potential customers and spread the words about your business and offerings to them.

There are numerous ways with which you can reach out to your potential customers. It can be done via social media posts, Facebook ads, google ads, email marketing, events, blog posts, contests and giveaways, search engine optimization, and other offline means: leaflets, posters, roadshows, TV ads, newspaper ads, etc.

Before you opt for any of the above-listed strategies, it is advisable to first get yourself started with marketing research which would help you identify the purpose of marketing and the best feasible way with which you can reach out to your potential audience. Once done, you can proceed with the phase of Marketing Strategy, Marketing Mix, and finally a Marketing Plan.

With this, you can reach out to your customers and spread the word about your business to them.

Step 4: Making your Subscription Box Website Profitable

Making your Subscription Business Profitable depends solely on your business model; the approach and strategies you have adopted, the expenses you have incurred, the pricing model you had opted for, etc. To proceed with profitability, you need to calculate the various costs incurred in setting up and running your business.

To calculate the profitability of your business, you do not just need to include your regular business expenses, but you also need to include the cost of your regular activities towards your business. Having an idea of this would help you in better decision-making for your business.

Here, we would like to recommend you some tips with which you can cut down costs and save value for your new business. These include:

• Automating wherever possible
• Tracking the time
• Analyze your finances
• Do not undercharge the customers
• Do not keep excess inventory
• Focus on increasing the orders
• Negotiate
• Do not pay for costly services
• Track the performances

This would allow you to have better control over your finances and would eventually add to the profitability of your business.

Step 5: Handling Complaints and Disputes on your Subscription Box Website

Handling Complaints and Disputes in a timely and effective manner increases the trust and faith of your customers towards your service. Research has shown that the major reasons for customers’ complaints include quality issues, incorrect delivery of the product when the customer has ordered something specific, and items being delivered wrongly. These are operational issues and to fix this, the ground-level teams need to be trained well.

Besides this, the other cause of complaints includes payment error, additional charge deduction while making the payment, refund issues at the time of payment, etc. Such issues can be handled by partnering with a reliable service provider who is quick and efficient in resolving such issues.

It is advisable to handle the customers politely and prudently while handling their complaints. At the end of the day, a happy customer is a customer who would continue to add value to your organization, if served well.

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As of now, you have an overview of starting a profitable subscription box business. Click here to get yourself started.