Subscription-based ecommerce offerings are seemingly everywhere these days. They’ve grown steadily and proliferated into new industries, particularly consumable products such as coffee, meal services, household supplies, beauty products, and more. 

There are plenty of benefits to offering ecommerce subscriptions including convenience, value, and consistency for customers as well as customer retention, recurring revenue streams, and more for businesses. 

In the last several years, we’ve heard from numerous teams interested in adding subscription offerings but they’re not sure if it’s possible with their Adobe Commerce (Magento) website. Let’s dive in.

Adobe Commerce subscription options

Can Adobe Commerce (Magento) handle subscriptions out of the box?

Adobe Commerce doesn’t include out-of-the-box subscription or recurring payment features. However, it does have support for “vaulted” payment methods and tokenization which is one of the key capabilities needed to have recurring payment models.

There are multiple extensions that build on the vault feature to offer recurring payments and subscriptions in Adobe Commerce. Shopify similarly doesn’t natively support subscriptions and requires the use of apps. We’ve used many of these extensions and lately have favored the Paradox Labs Adaptive Subscriptions extension. Extensions like this are often a great starting point to build subscription customer flows that will be unique to your business.

Which SaaS subscription service options work with Adobe Commerce (Magento)?

There are a variety of Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription services available on the market. Examples include Recurly, Subscribe Pro, ReCharge, Chargebee, and Chargify. These dedicated applications come with a host of tools for subscription management to handle the automation of recurring transactions and payment methods.

One of the main benefits of using an external SaaS-based option is that they handle the “recurrence” after the initial purchase. For a business with thousands of daily subscriptions, this helps offload the automated order processing from the main ecommerce store.

Defining your plan for subscriptions

Start your subscription project with a deep dive into your business and identify all customer pathways. There are typically multiple entry points for customers to navigate through the subscription process, so spending the time to do this step right will save time in the long run.
 
We bring this all together into an implementation plan to guide development:

• Define the base technology, payments, and extension stack.
• Define the various types of subscriptions you’re offering. For example member clubs, gift subscriptions, as well as subscribe and save.
• List the subscription entry points and how updates will occur. This typically results in a user flow diagram with all the various decision points.
• Working with your UX team, create wireframes (interactive wireframes are ideal) for how the customer will interact through those flows.

Case studies of successful Adobe Commerce (Magento) subscriptions

Every Man Jack

Every Man Jack wanted to create an easy and immersive browsing experience for their website visitors while presenting their subscription product offerings. With Adobe Commerce as their commerce platform and an in-depth subscription scope plan in hand, they initially launched their subscription line of business with integration between Magento 2 and Subscribe Pro.

Their highly-custom subscription offering included:

• Starter kits, that convert to full-size.
• Subscriptions to a “box” with varying products.
• Order frequency management.
• Conversion is a standard one-time purchase to a subscription.
• Editing subscription contents for the next box.
• Modifying the box before the next shipment.
• Integrated one-time or subscriptions on a single PDP.
• Custom cart flow for subscriptions.

Learn more in the Every Man Jack case study.

Seattle Coffee Gear

Seattle Coffee Gear helps customers make an excellent cup of coffee in the comfort of their own homes. Their goal was to make it easy for customers to reorder and discover new products so they set out to implement a sophisticated coffee subscription line of business on their Adobe Commerce platform.

Using the Paradox Labs Adaptive Subscriptions module as a base, the Bear Group team built a highly-custom integration with their Adobe Commerce website, ERP system, and Klaviyo email marketing.

Their subscription offerings included three primary user flows, support for multi-destination subscriptions, existing subscription data migration, all relevant front-end development for subscription landing pages, account dashboards, and product detail pages.

Learn more in the Seattle Coffee Gear case study.

Classmates.com® ​

Classmates®, a division of PeopleConnect, emerged in the early days of the internet boom as a social networking service a whole nine years before Facebook came on the scene. Today the company helps people find members of their high school graduating and other classes and now includes scanned yearbooks and yearbook reprints.

In late 2021, they introduced a new subscription module connecting Adobe Commerce and their other back-of-house systems. On the front end, the Bear Group team developed a custom product page to make it easy to choose a subscription tier while matching the look and feel of the Classmates website. Within the admin, the member care team can manage orders and subscriptions.

Learn more in the Classmates case study.

Final Thoughts

Subscription services have only grown in popularity over the years, and they’ve provided many benefits to ecommerce businesses. If you have any questions about our approach to ecommerce subscriptions on Adobe Commerce or would like help, feel free to reach out to us. If you're curious to see how Adobe Commerce stacks up against other ecommerce platforms, be sure to check out our Ecommerce Platform Comparison Guide.