Starting a website for subscription box business

[Kate_E]

Hi all!

I am in the very early stages of looking into setting up a subscription box service - I will fill the details in on the product as I get closer.
At the moment, I am hoping to save some money on website building. Can anyone advise on the best platform to build your own site on? Or is it really not worth trying to do this on my own?

Years a go I used create.net with some success, I currently run a wordpress blog and I have some skills on adobe AI so I have some experience but very limited. I don't mind the site being simple as long as it looks professional and user friendly.

Any advice from those running e-commerce sites greatly received.
Thanks,
Kate

 

[Financial-Modeller]

Cost of marketing / customer acquisition for a business like this is likely to be substantial.

Unless you have a really good way around this, asking how to save money building a website suggests that you may struggle without further funding.

 

[The Byre]

The moment you tell the world that you may just be in the market for a website, all sorts of web builders will shoot up out of the ground. They will follow you to the shops and may camp outside your front door. When you take a bath, don't be too surprised if you find a few of them nestling in the soap dish!

I would combine the two - a professionally built frontend and the in-depth stuff DIY. Prices seem to start at around £400 for a simple four-page frontend. As you know your way around WordPress, get a WordPress site and you can build on that.

Make sure that you have total and complete control and any pro-built site is not on a server you have no control over.

 

[Underline Digital]

You can quite easily build this on WooCommerce.
We have built 2 of them, one for fashion and one for nutty snacks since the Covid pandemic kicked in. Both using Wordpress and WooCommerce, so very much achievable using these platforms.

 

[iDigLocal]

Wordpress and woocommerce is very good. You can get a free theme (try and get one that doesn't want you to use loads of plugins and is very simple. And @The Byre is correct. Make sure you have control of the website, your hosting and your domain (the domain is very important).

Woocommerce also has a number of plugins, some of which will add some extra functionality that you may find useful for running a subscription service.

 

[Chris Elwood]

Hi, We have also built a food-based subscription service using Woo-Commerce. There is a plugin that allows for subscription-based products on a weekly/monthly basis. As others have said you will need to allocate quite a bit of time and effort into marketing if you need big numbers to make the model work. The one we were involved with was very localised and only needed 20-30 subscribers to make it viable. I am always happy to have a chat with anyone who is looking for a bit of advice.