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Needing to expand subscription capacity, Dollar Shave Club pulled off a miracle this week: migrating from a homegrown ecommerce system to a new one in just three days.
The direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand migrated over one million subscribers from its homegrown ecommerce solution to third-party platforms for subscription management, customer support and marketing automation. Even more amazing, they did it with a 99.99% success rate and no downtime.
“We’re very happy with the launch timeline and experience,” said Ranil Wiratunga, Dollar Shave Club’s Chief Digital Officer & global GM of DTC. “Subscriptions are a critical component of our business, so if we had any downtime or issues in the migration, it would have been costly.”
Shopify Plus-centric stack. Dollar Shave Club uses the Shopify Plus ecommerce platform, which powers the company’s website and product catalog. Shopify Plus supports a wide range of sellers, from boutique DTC shops to large retailers like Staples. Pricing begins at $2,000 per month.
Other components in the new stack include:
- Ordergroove for subscriber experience;
- Gorgias for customer support and
- Klaviyo for marketing automation.
Shopify Plus design and development agency partner iamota supported the migration and coordinated with the implementation teams at Ordergroove, Gorgias and Klaviyo.
Maintain and grow subscribers. Dollar Shave Club used to be subscription-only. It now offers one-time purchasing online. However, a significant part of this omnichannel strategy is converting new customers into loyal subscribers once they try the products. The new technology is designed to support this.
“First and foremost, this shift is going to help maintain and grow our seven-figure subscriber base in a way that simply became too challenging for Dollar Shave Club to handle on its own,” said Wiratunga. “It was important to us to guarantee that if a customer had been receiving the exact box type for the last 10 years, they would experience the exact same service level moving forward onto a new platform.”
Ordergoove supports and manages the subscriber interface and recurring payments across the subscriber journey and works closely with Shopify Plus.
“The two platforms (Ordergroove and Shopify Plus) are closely integrated, so the customer experience is seamless, which was critical for our business and a key part of why we decided to partner with Ordergroove,” Wiratunga said.
Pricing for Ordergroove varies based on a company’s subscription revenue, with no hidden transaction fees. Other DTC brands that use the platform include The Honest Company and Peet’s Coffee. It’s also used by CPG and retail brands like L’Oréal and Petsmart.
“Ordergroove is flexible enough that any brand can use it and see success, but we’re typically best for brands that are serious about subscriptions and want to offer a delightful experience that maximizes customer lifetime value,” said Lauren Lowman, VP of Marketing at Ordergroove. “Our solution is extremely flexible, enabling merchants to create innovative subscriber experiences that boost acquisition, retention and average order value, unlocking growth for brands.”
Migration. In 2022, about a year prior to the migration, Dollar Shave Club decided to move away from homegrown solutions.
“We’d built our own internal subscription platform, but as Dollar Shave Club continued to grow, we recognized that supporting our own platform and innovating for growth would be taxing, both financially and in terms of internal talent and resources,” Wiratunga explained. “At the time, we were spending about 40% of our existing resources on simply maintaining our subscription offerings, so we had to balance that maintenance with innovation. We wanted to push customer journeys and experiences into the future, and we didn’t have the manpower and the resources to deliver on both of those visions.”
The company, a subsidiary of Unilever, decided on Ordergroove in December of 2022 and for there continued to review other parts of the tech stack.
Staffing. The new platforms help grow marketing capabilities without having to hire additional staff or replace existing positions.
“We worked with iamota to help implement Ordergroove, Shopify, and Klaviyo,” said Wiratunga. “We did not have to hire specialists to manage these platforms, but it does enable non-technical resources to work on consumer experiences without technical support. Ordergroove is very easy to use, so while there’s a bit of a learning curve, it was not steep by any means. The team has quickly gotten used to and excited by the new tools and capabilities it offers.”
Data and AI. To power the marketing automation platform Klaviyo, Dollar Shave Club uses data from across its tech stack to create and send highly personalized emails at scale.
Klaviyo’s integration with Ordergroove and Shopify Plus means that customer data is accessible and actionable for Dollar Shave Club.
“The combination of these tools acts as our CRM or CDP,” said Wiratunga. “With our new tech stack, we now have access to more data and automation that will allow us to create a more personalized experience for our members.”
He added, “We do use AI models to predict consumer buying behavior. However, we’re excited to deploy some of our technical resources we used to spend on maintenance of our homegrown platform to explore more AI tools and implementation tests in the future.”
Why we care. DTC brands like Dollar Shave Club used the subscription model to disrupt traditional shopping patterns for everyday CPG products. In this digital-first environment, traditional grocery and drug store categories are also using subscriptions to increase sales to regular customers. Many of these brands and retailers are working together more closely through retail media networks. Brands that used homegrown solutions are now looking at third-party solutions to increase digital sales and subscriptions.
Dig deeper: How Georgia-Pacific connects with customers on retail media networks
The post Why Dollar Shave Club cut its homegrown ecommerce system appeared first on MarTech.
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