bg-release notes – December 2023

December 2023 Release Notes

In this month’s release notes, we’re throwing a holiday retention party for you and all of the new subscribers you worked hard to acquire this season ?

We launched multiple new features for analyzing churn and increasing retention, including completely new reporting for churn & retention cohort analysis, and our MAPs service for automating changes to Scheduled Orders and subscriber flows is finally out of beta!

Joining the holiday retention party is our latest partner integration with subscriber retention platform, Upzelo. Upzelo is packed with next-level retention marketing features and templates, so be sure to check out our demo of the integration (below) and read on for a special offer from the Upzelo team.

Before we say “last call” on 2023, we’ll also highlight a few recent updates to our Autoship Cloud integrations with WooCommerce and Shopify including HPOS (High Performance Order Storage) support for Woo and a silky-smooth new Shopify Customizer integration to nail your product page offers. Let’s get into it!

New! Churn Analytics ?

You asked:

  • How many subscribers did I gain each month, and how many have I retained from each month?
  • How many days do my subscribers typically stay active?
  • How many Scheduled Orders have been processed once versus multiple times… and how does that correlate with average order value?

We responded by adding new Churn Analytics Reports.

Retention Cohorts by Scheduled Order groups Scheduled Orders by the month they were created in, and provides a cohort analysis that shows how many Scheduled Orders are still active and retained for each month after they were created, and how many were ultimately deleted/canceled over a rolling period of 12 months.

Scheduled Order Churn tracks the average and maximum number of days that Scheduled Orders remain Active and also the average & maximum number of days after they are created that they become deleted/canceled.

Scheduled Order By Cycles groups Scheduled Orders of any status by their number of successful processing cycles and compare them with each group’s average order value (AOV). Does AOV increase with each successful renewal order? Use this report to find out and identify opportunities to increase retention and AOV!

Deleted Scheduled Order By Cycles groups Scheduled Orders that are Deleted status by their number of successful processing cycles and compare them with each group’s AOV. Do Scheduled Orders that are canceled after their first processing cycle have a lower Order Value than Scheduled Orders canceled after their second or third processing cycle?

Learn more about how to use each of these new reports on our new doc: Understanding Churn Reports.


New! Don’t Just Analyze Churn… Increase Retention with Upzelo

Now that you’re digging into your Churn Analytics and thinking up ways to increase retention and recurring revenue, we’d love for you to get a quick retention WIN and check out our latest integration with subscriber retention platform: Upzelo.

Upzelo is a flexible and powerful subscriber retention platform for designing and automating flows to win-back subscribers based on distinct customer and lifecycle marketing factors.

Check out our walkthrough and demo on YouTube to see just how quickly you can start increasing retention with Autoship Cloud powered by QPilot and Upzelo.

Why we love Upzelo for our Merchants

When we first met the Upzelo team, we were intrigued by their retention strategies and success stories of reducing churn by an average of 36.6% and generating 3-10x ROI in just 30 days from launch.

What further impressed the QPilot team was the product & team behind the numbers.

After working with Upzelo ourselves, here’s what stood out:

  • Impressive library of templates for cancelation surveys, win-back offers, and A/B testing offers & messaging
  • Easily customized and branded to look and feel seamless with your existing subscriber portal and customer experience
  • Real-time activity feed with built-in email and Slack notifications that keep your team engaged with retention performance
  • A big vision and appetite for working hands-on with merchants. Upzelo’s team has experience working with many types of subscription brands AND is super-engaged with helping subscription brands.
  • No-code integration with Autoship Cloud powered by QPilot. Upzelo’s developers worked hand-in-hand with QPilot’s Dev team to deliver an integration that works for our WooCommerce and Shopify merchants without the need for any additional or custom coding.

Ready to increase retention with Upzelo?

Sign up here to register your Upzelo account and book a demo with them to get the retention party started ?

And… if you use the link to signup or mention QPilot during your demo, you’ll also get 10% off your Upzelo subscription ?


Out of Beta! Trigger + Automate Changes to Scheduled Orders, Build Subscription Flows, and Save Time with MAPs

MAPs (short for “Merchant Automated Programs”) are a no-code service that Merchants use to automate updates and changes to Scheduled Orders.

Merchants often refer to MAPs as “Automations”, “Flows” or “Campaigns” because they work similarly to how other no-code automation services like Klaviyo, Zapier, or IFTTT work.

We Made a YouTube Demo to Help You Learn About MAPs (…of course!)

Get started with some basic time-saving automations and then see how you can use MAPs to build out subscription marketing flows with examples inspired by Petco’s Repeat Delivery Offer and Dollar Shave Club’s Subscription Refills in our YouTube demo of MAPs powered by QPilot, or head over to our docs site to learn more about setting up MAPs for your Autoship or Subscribe & Save program.

Here’s what to know about MAPs being out of beta:

  • MAPs has been in beta for over a year and is now available in your QPilot Site’s Dashboard > MAPs
  • All Autoship Cloud powered by QPilot stores can enable 2 Default MAPs: Delete Paused and Delete Failed Scheduled Orders to help save time and cost for deleting/canceling stale Scheduled Orders.
  • MAPs is powered by QPilot and works for both Woo and Shopify-connected sites without any plugin or app updates.
  • The ability to create and add more MAPs depends on your subscription to Autoship Cloud.
    • Initially, only merchants subscribed to Growth and Marketer plans can add new MAPs beyond the 2 Default MAPs. We do intend to enable Starter plans with additional MAPs in the future.
  • There are a lot of possible ways to setup & configure MAPs, and we will continue to add more based on your feedback – so please continue to share your feedback with us by sending us a chat or contact form at https://support.autoship.cloud
  • If you were part of the MAPs beta, your enabled MAPs are still running… and thank you ?

WooCommerce Updates: HPOS Support for ‘Woo

As many of you know by now, WooCommerce has rebranded to just “Woo” and invites you to say hello to the new Woo.com ?

While the rebrand was a nice touch from the Woo team, our Dev and QA teams worked hard to make sure that Woo’s latest performance update known as High Performance Order Storage (or HPOS), which was released publicly in October, was fully compatible with Autoship Cloud so that our Woo merchants can safely choose to enable HPOS after updating to the latest version of the Autoship Cloud powered by QPilot plugin.

Other improvements to Autoship Cloud for WooCommerce:

  • After our 2.5.0 plugin update that added compatibility support for HPOS, we published a minor update to resolve errors that would occur for sites extending the Coupons functionality of WooCommerce.
  • We added support for Upzelo integration with the Native UI Display option so that you can seamlessly display Upzelo’s targeted cancelation surveys and offers without any additional custom coding.

Check out the full plugin changelog here on WordPress.org.


Shopify Updates: Focus on Product Page Speed and Autoship App Block Customizer

We released several updates in November and December to improve the speed of the Autoship Cloud Product Page Widget and also updated the widget so that you can easily place and customize your Autoship or Subscribe & Save offers on your Product Display Pages using the magic of the Shopify Customizer!

Here are a few of the most popular ways to customize the Autoship Cloud Widget:

  • Display the price in the Buy Once label and display the discounted price in the Subscribe & Save label
  • Change the text content in the “Why Subscribe” pop-up
  • Select the subscription option by default (instead of Buy Once)

Learn more about customizing your Shopify Product Page in our updated support doc.

Other improvements to Autoship Cloud for Shopify:

  • Replaced the old product page widget with a Shopify native solution
  • Added caching to the API product response for the widget to speed up the endpoint
  • Added start and end processing times for newly connected Shopify Sites
  • Added a new validation endpoint to support the import of Scheduled Orders to Shopify-connected QPilot Sites
  • Fixed an issue that would cause some coupons to be removed after processing a Scheduled Order

Tell Us What You Think

Whether you have a question, an idea, or just want to let us know how things are going, we care a great deal about what you think. Please take a moment and let us know anything that’s on your mind by taking this survey to let us know, or sending us an email.