Shave & Subscribe is an online subscription service that supplies its high volume of customers with regular shaving products to their homes. For their clients to receive a convenient service, the client’s site required a facility that could take monthly payments from customers from a carefully designed and easy-to-use website platform. Shave & Subscribe needed to provide people with a professionally produced payment method. The service required necessary e-commerce tools to ensure positive and efficient customer service. At Castle, we offered Shave & Subscribe custom Magento web design to optimised their services at a competitive price.

The Challenge

Many online platforms do not support recurring payments, further to this issue is finding an online merchant system that can accept automated card payment transitions. We needed to find a CMS and online merchant system that allowed this.

The second major challenge was the client’s insistence on using Magento web design as the front end platform. They wanted to have an open-source site that was not bound by a template.

The third major challenge was to add a single added payment at a discounted rate for the razor blade handle. This singular payment would be added to the basket but then couldn’t be added to the remaining payments of the monthly subscription.

The Solution

In our search from a dynamic CMS, we came across a system called CrateJoy, it allowed us to also build a bespoke front-end design in Magento and connect them. We designed the homepage with anchor points once each step was complete. To make the user experience as seamless as possible, we created a three-step process; blades, frequency, order.

We then also built a module within the coupon code facility to offer a discounted handle price. The coupon code feature allowed us to add the transaction to one singular payment for the first purchase and not be included in the remaining payments.

The Value

Their original system was unstable and unreliable. It broke several times, which led to us being awarded the contract for the rebuild. Further to their issue, was PayPal. Like many online merchant systems, they find it difficult to manage repeat payments. With our hybrid site, we were able to contribute to the sites 12,000 subscription list, an increase of 4000%. Our system also remained and still remains stable.