Best Shopify Subscription Apps Comparison

For e-commerce stores, subscription apps are a popular tactic for increasing sales and maintaining the overall sales figures.

Shopify and Shopify Plus don’t handle frequent charges as a part of their basic product. Hence if you want if you want a subscription business model work for your store, you need to use an app. To make it easy for you here we will break down the comparison between two best Shopify subscription apps.

It’s a fact that recurring buyers are most profitable to your business. The longer we endure buyer relationships, the more valuable that customer becomes. 

Customer retention is directly related to long-term revenue growth. One of the most effective ways to retain customer over long term is to setup customers to buy repeatedly, right from the start of their customer lifetime. Subscriptions and recurring purchases do away with many of the reasons for churn and attrition in the ecommerce business model.

Subscription e-commerce with Shopify

The main problem with Shopify is that it doesn’t store payment information. Therefore, you have to get customers come back to your site for ordering again but due to such busy life many time most of the satisfied customers also drop out.

Here is a solution of what you can do to make is easy for customers to keep buying on regular basis. You can make it simple for them to subscribe. It’s better for you and for them too. You can get recurring sales and they can get the product they love and what to have.

Amongst several Shopify Apps these two apps are the best: Subscription by ReCharge and Bold Subscriptions. Let’s dive into the detail to know more about these apps.

Subscription by ReCharge

ReCharge is the chosen Shopify plus app partner for subscriptions, due to their sole focus on this niche (unlike Bold who develops many apps alongside running an agency).

Highlight features

• Connect with Shopify orders to get buyers’ data
• Boost the number of subscription
• Increase the number of loyalty customers by portable experience
• Create a box of cancellation reasons
• Provide a speedy API and management system

Bold Subscription

Bold has a large team of in-house developers and product managers. Choosing an app developer with a robust and established team over an indie developer typically works out better for longer term business needs.

Highlight features

• Build customers trust
• Construct on Shopify Plus and Enterprise
• Provide full design and language control
• Set fixed delivery date every month
• Send robust notifications via emails

Subscriptions by ReCharge Review

Because of the ReCharge team’s laser focus on subscriptions, they’ve left all features that fall outside of this to other apps. And to bring those features to their plus customers, they’ve built deep useful integrations and a rock solid API.

ReCharge API

The ReCharge API allows a Shopify expert developer to achieve more or less anything in terms of UI and UX. The ReCharge API allows your developers (or a ReCharge certified partner) to create essentially anything you’d like. The API exists to break down and rebuild every aspect of the customer journey to allow complete and total customization.

ReCharge Dunning Management

Dunning is a great way to reduce churn. Update payment details, retry failed transactions and send reminder emails for credit cards that will expire in the near future.

ReCharge Workflows

Workflows are like Zapier for ReCharge. You can automate offers like free trials, samples, discounting first or repeat orders and activating paid subscriptions when free trials expire.

ReCharge Customer portal customization

Different to the normal custom CSS form field Subscriptions offers the ReCharge Theme Engine that lets you customize your subscription area’s in detail.

You can again customize the look and feel and functionality to more or less whatever you want, budget and time depending of course, as with all development projects.

ReCharge Shopify App Integrations

ReCharge integrates with a lot of other Shopify apps, including:

• CartHook
• Churnbuster
• Glew.io
• Google Analytics
• Gorgias
• Klaviyo
• LeadDyno
• Littledata
• Loqate
• LoyaltyLion
• MailChimp
• Octane AI
• One Click Upsell
• Product Customizer
• ReferralCandy
• Refersion
• Smile.io
• Sublytics
• Submetrics
• Swell
• Tradegecko
• Ultimate Upsell
• Zapier

ReCharge Payment gateways

Your four options for recurring purchases on ReCharge are Stripe, BrainTree, and Authorize.net, Apple pay and Paypal as a secondary provider.

Bold Subscriptions by Bold Review

As suggested Bold is a larger team and can offer long term solutions for future proofed development.

Bold Gifting Subscription Features

The Bold subscription app is better suited for gifting. ReCharge needs custom code to get gifting right. Bold does this without extra developer costs.

Bold Analytics

Bold analytics is better than the standard ReCharge analytics. Enhanced analytics by ReCharge is more comparable, but also more expensive.

Bold subscription options

Bold allows customers to add typically one-time purchased products alongside subscription products and include them in their recurring order. This can help increase average order value. It can also confuse the customer and over complicate shipping and logistics.

Bold customer portal customization

Bold’s personalization of the look and feel can be done with CSS. This means you don’t need special tools like the ReCharge theme engine. You are then faster at changing core elements CSS, but more limited overall in the level of customization possible. It’s also easier to hire Shopify experts to help with customization, it will be fiddly due to Shopify’s caching settings.

Bold app integrations

Bold integration list is smaller than ReCharge’s and the depth of integration is shallower.

• Google Analytics
• Google Autocomplete
• Facebook Pixel
• Referralcandy
• Refersion
• Addressy
• Klaviyo
• Shoelace

Bold payment gateways

You don’t have to have the subscription payment gateway match your normal payment gateway. Bold has many more options than ReCharge.

• Stripe
• BrainTree
• Authorize.net
• Beanstream
• Checkout.com
• Conekta
• CyberSource
• Elavon
• eWay Rapid
• Fat Zebra
• MasterCard
• Moneris
• PayPal
• QuickPay
• SagePay
• USAePay
• WorldPay

Conclusion: ReCharge vs Bold

Whether you choose ReCharge vs Bold, both tools will allow you to run a subscription business.

Choose ReCharge if:

• Subscription products are the core offering in your business and your positioned as a subscription business
• You want to hit a large scale of orders and with need dunning management
• You want to heavily customize the UX (with the ReCharge API)
• You’ll need to also heavily customize the portcal (ReCharge Theme Engine)
• You need deep analytics with the ReCharge enhanced analytics
• You have a larger budget and it warrants paying ReCharge’s commissions to get subscriptions right

Choose Bold if:

• Subscription products are not your core offering
• You want to mirror the Amazon subscribe option on your Shopify site
• You want more payments gateways out of the box
• You don’t need integrations to be deep
• You want better analytics out of the box
• You use other Bold apps a lot and want them to integrate well together