The Easiest Way to Build a Meal Box Subscription Site
Food. It seems everyone’s eating it these days. You can buy it online or in-store, for delivery or pickup. The best brands find ways to make it easy to consume their product – on a repeat basis. Blue Apron and Hello Fresh have been blazing the trail for a while now, setting the standard for customer experience and expectation.
The Cost of Building it Yourself
Popular brands like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh offer a flexible, easy-to-use online shopping experience via an ecommerce platform. You have a couple of options to choose from when getting started.
A really popular option is Shopify – easy to start and even easier to manage – but you lack a lot of customization and the flexible scheduling options customers expect (especially for food delivery).
The next option is to build it yourself. This is how the big names did it, and indeed, it’s pretty much how every business in this market has done it. Ultimately, they wanted total control over the customer experience, with specific features that they built out for themselves.
But at what cost?
Statistically speaking, most developers require $50,000 just to get started. Creating a platform that can facilitate the purchasing of customizable repeat orders via an online store requires web development. These projects require a lot of work, and developers are expensive.
A big problem with creating something from scratch is that you can never be sure how long it will take – or even if – to work. You have to start with a minimal viable product and add from there. Think of it like building blocks – you need to start somewhere.
If what you want doesn’t exist anywhere else, then this may be your only option. It’s why brands like Daily Harvest, Blue Apron, and Hello Fresh built out their own. You need what you need, and there aren’t any substitutes.
Surprise Delivery: QPilot in Your Box
Evaluating the pros and cons of customizing your own solution is tough. So while those businesses wanted a custom box, failed to find one handy, and decided to build their own, QPilot went and made a box that you can customize. A software solution for any meal subscription box.
QPilot powers the Autoship Cloud plugin on WooCommerce. With Autoship Cloud, you get the functionality and flexibility of a custom solution, but you’re up and running in a fraction of the time. Setup is easy and straightforward, and we help you get your repeat order system online in less than a week.
Don’t believe us? Luckily, we have an easy way to prove it.
All you have to do is peruse the site to see how well it works.
We’ve built the site to mirror how Daily Harvest and Blue Apron seek to collect emails at the beginning of the customer journey. Understanding the customer journey [link to longer customer journey piece] is critical to crafting an on-brand experience for your customers. The site is fully fleshed out and ready to be tested to your heart’s content.
Why collect an email upfront? Use an abandoned cart series for anyone that’s perused your site!
So go ahead. Take a tour of what we’ve mocked up. We’re confident you’ll find that our system rivals or exceeds the capabilities, quality, and smoothness of customer experience of any custom platform. What’s more, our platform can match the big brands feature-for-feature (and then some).
Did you know, creating a powerful, flexible, and dynamic eCommerce Meal Subscription site like HelloFresh, Blue Apron, Daily Harvest and Freshly is not only easier than you think but can be done without a checkout!?!
We’ve crafted this step by step guide to walk you through the steps and code to create a site just as dynamic as those already out there using the flexibility of WordPress, power of WooCommerce, and automation of Autoship Cloud, all without needing the customer to go through a checkout to create a subscription!
Proof in the Delivered Pudding
Our promises of customization and simplicity aren’t just empty platitudes, and you don’t have to just take our word for it. Instead, we mixed up some digital proof pudding, and it’s out for delivery. We built a demo site that demonstrates just how beautiful and effective your site would look using our WooCommerce subscription plugin. We built a site that demonstrates how your site would not only look, but actually function. We set up the products, set the prices, determined choices for shipping frequency, and set the lock window [https://autoship.cloud/ecommerce-tips/why-you-need-a-lock-window/]; the works.
Complete How-to Guide
A Meal Box Subscription site without a checkout: weeklyfresh.co
Get Started or Select a Step:
Questions about how Autoship Cloud powered by QPilot will work for your brand? Talk to a member of our team today and find out how we can help transform your meal subscription box experience.