Our mission is to bring the best business model in the universe to everyone on the planet.
We take our mission very seriously. Some say *too* seriously. We even made an over-the-top mission page so that everyone can see how obsessed we are with the subscription model.
Part of being absolutely and totally obsessed with subscription businesses is celebrating what we’ve accomplished while being brutally honest with ourselves about how far we’ve got left to go.
This is the time of the quarter where we reflect. We reflect on what we did last quarter, and what we intend to accomplish this quarter.
If you’ve logged into Cratejoy recently you may have noticed a survey that pops up in the lower right corner of your screen.
You may further have noticed that it kept popping up even after you filled it out. Sorry about that.
We have taken all of the information that you’ve told us and used it to help inform our product decisions for the next quarter. The good news is that we already were working on almost everything you told us.
This blog post is broken into three parts.
- What we did for you last quarter
- What you’re asking for
- What we’re doing for you next
Please read it and leave a comment below to let us know what you think about our plan going forward!
What we did for you last quarter
The minimum number of new releases we do per week at Cratejoy is 3 but we’ve done as many as 6 in a single week before. It’s hard to keep track of everything we’ve done. Just in the last 3 months we’ve done over 75 new releases. Below are the highlights of the improvements we’ve made over the last few months.
One time sales
One time sales is one of our most requested pieces of functionality. We released this as a completely free upgrade in March. One time sales has already driven an additional $342,000 in revenue to sellers who are using it. We wrote a Subscription School article on how to add one time sales to your business.
Referral program
In late March we released the referral program as an app in our app store. Since then it has driven over $600 in additional revenue to each store using it (on average) … in one month!
We wrote a subscription school article on how to add a referral program that works to your subscription business.
New themes
We’ve added new themes to choose from in our design store. Rapido is a pre-sale theme so you can run a pre-sales campaign to get financial traction with your business. Betterman is a fixed width theme that looks great without requiring you to have gigantic photos that scale well across large and small monitors.
Subscription calculator
We released two powerful new tools to help you plan for your business. Read more at the announcement blog post.
What you’re telling us right now
The good: Our customer support is awesome!
We love hearing that you appreciate our Customer Support!
(This is us excited)
Support is something we work extremely hard on. Supporting our sellers is the absolute most important thing we do at Cratejoy.
There’s a few reasons our support is so great:
- Everyone on Cratejoy support is on-site, full time, and salaried. There are no call centers staffed with dozens of hourly workers. Support is part of our core offering, and we treat it as such.
- Everyone in the company does support including all our engineers and the CEO. That means that we know what you’re feeling. There aren’t middle managers between the leaders of the company and the customer. We interact with you and feel the triumphs and failures of your business every day. We might even stress out about it more than you do sometimes.
I want to give a hat-tip to our runner up: the awesome customer account page. We agree, it is great that your customers don’t have to e-mail you for every little thing you need to see changed. Keep your eyes peeled for more improvements here too 😉
The stuff we already knew: We should continue to focus on customer acquisition and retention
(This is us feeling validated)
We knew this! That’s great, we were focused on getting and retaining customers last quarter. Also this quarter…. and every other quarter.
This is one of our prime directives and we absolutely will continue to build more features and find more ways to get you customers.
You also want more help with shipping & logistics. This is probably why the shipping page was our #2 most disliked part of the platform (below). We’re working on building features for this, scroll to the “What’s next” section to get the details on our solution here! We’re also going to try to help you find good warehousing partners and custom box builders. We’ve already had a list of resources on subscription school – expect to see that list grow and more tools built to make logistics more approachable.
The ugly: Our shipping page and designer need work
We hear you. And we’re *determined* to make these better for you.
(This is us being determined)
Seriously though. We are on top of this. We know that right now when you’re first joining the platform the designer isn’t world-class yet. We know it’s missing features. We also know it can be frustrating to work with.
We also know that the shipments page can be frustrating. This is especially true if you have many orders that are pre-paid for multiple terms. We’ve been working on this secretly for a while now. You will start seeing changes in the next week or two.
What is happening this quarter
A better website designer
Believe it or not, we have been working on this! It will be a long road to recovery here because a website designer is not just something we can “throw together.” But we’ve got something almost ready to turn you loose on. When it’s ready we’ll make sure you get the opportunity to help us beta test it and give us feedback!
A new shipping page
YES, finally. We’re making shipping better. It’ll be easy to tell who you need to ship to. You will be able to print all of your shipping labels with just a single button press. You’ll be able to do bulk actions on more than one page.
More customer acquisition features
We’ve heard you loud and clear. You all want us to help you find more customers and retain the ones you’ve got. We’ve got one very big feature in progress for this and a lot of little ones too.
Sold out and inventory tracking
We’re making it very easy to cap the maximum number of subscribers you can handle at any given time. Your store will still collect the information from your visitors. You will be able to e-mail them once you have more capacity in your subscription. We know a bunch of you were sweating this – your wait is almost over!
Intercom integration (beta)
Integrating with the Intercom.io CRM means that you can automatically send churn-busting e-mails or reactivation e-mails. For instance, you can send an e-mail 15 days after someone fails to renew offering them a discount if they re-activate their subscription. This is a powerful tool that is currently in private beta with a few sellers.
But that’s not all….
This is me with a secret.
Keep your eyes peeled for a new super secret announcement in the next week or so! I can’t tell you what it is. I can tell you it’s designed to make you a bunch more money though! Stay tuned 😉
Please let me know what you think about what we’ve done so far and what our plan is going forward in the comments section below!
This is all very exciting! Especially the shipment improvements! However, we were hoping to see upcoming improvements to the gifting feature, which needs a lot of attention. Is this on the radar?
Lindsey – yes it’s definitely on the radar. We probably going to completely rebuild gifting, or at least significantly overhaul it. I would expect Q3 though.
In the mean time we are going to fix any major problems with it. Feel free to e-mail us and let us know what you think the worst parts are (support@cratejoy.com).
Hi Amir and team, just a quick note from your UK client PondipTackleBox.com to say thank you for the support you have shown us over the last year. Your product has come a long way since we first started with you, and I and the team look forward to seeing it go even further. Some UK specific features like PayPal would be awesome… but you already knew that! Good luck. Simon
Thanks Simon! Yes we definitely are going to build Paypal it’s just a matter of timing. We already have the relationship in place with the Paypal team, but we have to address some of the areas of the platform like Shipping above before we can put people on Paypal as it’s going to be pretty hard.
Thanks for the kind words 🙂