Business spotlight: How Beachly took care of order fulfillment for subscription boxes
Which beach-goer are you?
The laid-back tanner 🍊
The one who's immediately in the water 🏄
Or the one who's doing some work in the shade? 👩💻 🌴
If your answer was #3, your workload probably needs some better productivity processes, just like Beachly's curation and fulfillment team’s did. Rob DuBois is Director of Logistics and Customer Service at Beachly, and he sat down to talk about an issue many small businesses and subscription box businesses face: order fulfillment.
Beachly is a subscription box brand specializing in coastal-cool wear and beach-inspired products. They started selling their beach boxes five years ago using Shopify and just had a revenue record-breaking year.
Getting to that point had some rough tides without being able to streamline their order-curation process for subscription box fulfillment. After downloading Edit Order, Beachly solved their initial problems by editing subscription orders with individual items and different variants. Now, with a new workflow using Product Shortcuts, they were able to achieve peak productivity. This season, they'll be able to hit the beach even sooner because of their newly added solution for their Shopify subscription box roadblock.
Subscription boxes caught in the riptide
Rob managed to fulfill subscription products on his own for over a year until the subscriber base got so large that he needed to hire a team of order curators. The business model offers subscription boxes four times per year to subscribers. Customers place a single order for their subscription and are charged quarterly or annually for the boxes. Since customers only need to place one order to receive their four separate boxes, on Beachly's Shopify store, the subscription box is one virtual product SKU and order curators add the individual items later.
"Our annual subscribers can choose different variants for their products like clothing sizes, styles and colors," said Rob. "Subscription orders can't properly be passed to the warehouse and fulfilled because any customization is lost."
Beachly’s order curators are vital for taking care of subscriber orders and making sure they get the right items in their box. Each box contains 6-8 pieces of apparel, accessories, and lifestyle products inspired by the beach delivered every three months. The team has to do some order processing before orders are ready for fulfillment. When they set up their Shopify store, Rob downloaded Edit Order by Cleverific and used it to successfully remove the subscription SKU and replace it with the individual items + variants based on what customers selected in their order, which was not possible in Shopify’s admin.
Better productivity = more time for the beach
While order curators were supplying timely and custom curation + relaxation vibes to subscribers, their work processes behind the scenes were getting hectic. With a growing volume of orders, Rob knew he would need to hire more help for the winter season.
“It was a lifesaver,” said Rob. “I was getting ready to hire another person, but then Product Shortcuts fell into my lap.”
It would take each curator two minutes per order to add the many different products that make up a subscription box. Each time a subscription order came in, the team would use Edit Order for faster order processing. They would add the eight separate items with the variants attached to the customer profile (customer's selected their preferred sizes at the beginning of the subscription sign-up). It was a good solution that was about to become better for Beachly.
"I'm always looking for opportunities to make my team's life easier because they're going through a lot of details," explained Rob. "Any time we can find something to eliminate errors and exhaustion, I'm all about it." Rob was ready to hire more curators to relieve some pressure on his team, but instead, Edit Order's Product Shortcuts feature was released.
What are Product Shortcuts?
"It was a lifesaver," said Rob. "I was getting ready to hire another person, but then Product Shortcuts fell into my lap."
Product Shortcuts are exactly what they sound like. The feature is a one-click shortcut to add product sets or commonly used products to your customer's orders while editing. For Beachly, it only takes one click to add all eight subscription items to the order, then they curate the order to the customer's preferences. Removing order-processing steps meant fewer chances for errors, so when it's time to fulfill an order, it's clear which products need picking.
Here's how it works:
A customer subscribes to Beachly's beach boxes to get 6-8 beach-inspired items per box, and it's time to ship one out. All those products under one SKU!
Beachly creates a Product Shortcut with all eight products from this month's box using the Edit Order app. If they need to, they can adjust the prices and variants of these items after adding them to the order.
When a subscription order comes in, or it's time to ship, all it takes is one click. Beachly's order curators add their Product Shortcut, and Edit Order will immediately add all items to the order.
A record-setting season
"Winter broke all the records; this was our most successful season to date," said Rob. They were able to get through all their orders with fewer clicks, searching, and errors.
“Product Shortcuts took [order processing] from two minutes to about 30 seconds”
"Product Shortcuts took [order processing] from two minutes to about 30 seconds," he said.
Beachly uses Product Shortcuts to streamline their subscription fulfillment and received tons of positive feedback from the team concerning how light and breezy the curating process is. With one of their biggest logistical struggles firmly behind them, Beachly is ready to set even more revenue records this year.
Want to learn more about Product Shortcuts?
See how Product Shortcuts works and examples of where you can use it
Get a step-by-step walkthrough on how to create your own shortcut
Watch a quick tutorial video for how to set up your first shortcut
