Subscription ecommerce examples: lessons from 17 stores

A subscription is the easiest thing in ecommerce to add and one of the hardest to sell well. Any Shopify store can install an app and put a “Subscribe and save” toggle on the product page. Far fewer make that toggle feel like the obvious choice, explain what it costs, or give people a reason to keep it running after the third delivery.

Seventeen stores in our Showcase sell on subscription. Most are food and drink (coffee roasters, energy drinks, snacks, chocolate, olive oil), but the group also includes drinkable supplements, a protein brand, a Swedish underwear label and a book club. Fourteen of them have been recognised by Awwwards. Mana Yerba Maté was a Site of the Year in 2023, and SŌM, Escape Coffee and Mate Libre each won Site of the Day with a Developer Award. They come from the United States, Canada, the UK, Belgium, Sweden and Australia.

This guide looks at what they do with subscriptions specifically: where the option sits, how it is priced and named, how people are tempted into a first order, and what keeps the product worth receiving. Every example comes from our editors’ notes on each store.

Put subscribe and buy once in the same card

The most consistent pattern across the group is simple. The subscription is not a separate product or a separate page. It is one of two choices inside the buy box, next to a one-time purchase, with the frequency set right there.

OEM, a Los Angeles wellness brand selling electrolyte drinks, hand care and incense, does this cleanly. Its product pages offer Buy once or Subscribe + Save, then let you choose delivery every 2, 4 or 6 weeks, without leaving the page. The rest of the store is a playful collage of pill and oval image masks with a live Los Angeles weather widget, but our editors noted that the product pages stay clear about ingredients, pricing and subscription options.

Mode Chocolate sells just two bars, dark and milk, sweetened with monk fruit. The product page carries a pack size choice of 10 or 20 bars and a one-time or subscribe and save option with a delivery frequency selector. Single O, the Sydney roaster, puts subscribe every two or four weeks for 10% off on the same page as its grind options, so the decision about how you brew and how often you want coffee happens in one place.

SŌM is the best-composed version. The Belgian energy-shot brand puts pack length (7 or 28 days), subscribe or buy once and the per-day cost into a single buy card. Our editors called it a well-thought-through buying module, and it is the reason a store with one product can feel considered rather than thin.

What to look at: keep the subscription inside the buy box, as an equal choice to a one-off purchase, with the delivery frequency picked in the same place. Every extra page between “I like this” and “send it every month” is a chance to lose the order.

Show the saving as a unit price

A percentage off is easy to ignore. A price per bar, per day or per bag is easier to compare and easier to justify. Several stores in this group lead with the unit, not the discount.

SŌM shows per-day pricing on each pack length, which turns a supplement into a daily cost you can weigh against a coffee. Mode shows the price per bar beside its 10 and 20-bar packs. Cob, the New York corn-free snack brand, shows the per-bag price and the saving on each of its subscription tiers. Assembly Coffee in Brixton shows price per kilo and the saving on each bag size.

CDLP, the Swedish underwear and essentials label, uses the same idea for multi-packs. Its pack selector runs from 1 to 3, 6 or 12 pieces with the saving shown, and the subscription sits alongside it. The two work together: one rewards buying more at once, the other rewards buying again.

What to look at: wherever a subscription or larger pack saves money, show the result as a unit price as well as a percentage. It makes the subscription easier to compare with buying once, and it gives people a number to remember.

Give the schedule real choices

The frequency selector is where a subscription either fits someone’s life or doesn’t. Stores that offer one fixed interval are asking customers to guess. Stores that offer three or four choices are asking how much they actually use.

The intervals in this group follow the product. OEM offers 2, 4 or 6 weeks for drinks and hand care. Single O offers two or four weeks for coffee. CDLP, selling underwear and socks, offers every 2, 3 or 6 months, which is a realistic rhythm for replacing basics. WatchHouse, the London roaster and café group, lists its coffee subscription as running on your own delivery schedule.

Graza, the olive oil brand, names “Subscribe and manage subscription” as a feature of the store in its own right, which matters as much as the first choice of interval. People who can change the schedule themselves are less likely to cancel when they have a full cupboard.

What to look at: set the intervals by how quickly the product is used, not by what the subscription app defaults to, and make it easy to change the schedule later.

Name the tiers so people can pick one

When a subscription has several sizes, the names do a lot of work. Numbers alone ask people to do maths. Names ask them which kind of customer they are.

Cob is the clearest example. Its subscription tiers are called Casual, Serious and All-in Snacker, each with its per-bag price and saving shown. Our editors noted that the product page makes those tiers easy to compare. The names are funny, but they are also useful: most people can tell straight away which one describes them.

Aardvark Book Club is a subscription business rather than a store with a subscription option. Members choose up to three hardcover books a month from a hand-picked selection, with a genre picker for discovery and gift subscriptions alongside. It is the one store in this group not built on Shopify. The choice is built into the membership itself, which suits a product where every delivery is different.

David Protein shows a different way to reward commitment. Alongside subscribe and save, it runs buy-4-get-1 bundles, so people who would rather stock up than sign up still have a reason to buy more.

What to look at: if you offer more than one subscription size, give each one a short name that describes the customer, and show the unit price for each so the comparison takes seconds.

Make the first order low-risk

Nobody subscribes to something they haven’t tried. The stores that sell subscriptions best give people a cheap, easy way to make a first order, then move them on to repeat deliveries.

Collider, a UK alcohol-free beer brewed with functional mushrooms and adaptogens, stacks several of these together. It has a build-a-bundle option, subscription or one-off purchase, a review score and testimonials on the homepage, a referral offer and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Our editors described it as a brand with flexible bundles that make trying it low-risk.

Mate Libre in Montreal offers “Build your box” for a mixed case of flavours, next to subscribe and save 10% and one-off boxes of 12. A mixed case is a sensible first order for a drink with several flavours, because it lets people find a favourite before committing to it.

Café Binocle, a Quebec micro-roaster, sells a tasting box of six 125 g coffees alongside its 300 g and 1 kg formats. Graza sells The Trio and a Starter Kit, plus refill cans for people who already own a bottle. Each is a step on a path: try a few, find one you like, then subscribe to it.

What to look at: offer at least one starter option (a mixed box, a tasting set or a trial pack) that leads naturally into a subscription, and say plainly what happens if it isn’t right.

Give subscribers a reason to keep the delivery coming

The hardest part of a subscription is month four. The product has stopped being new, and the customer starts to wonder whether they still need it. The stores in this group that sell coffee are particularly good at keeping each delivery interesting, and their methods work for other products too.

Assembly Coffee treats each coffee as a numbered release, with a header counter showing how many coffees it has launched. Product pages set out producer, region, variety, terroir and process as a data sheet, then recommend specific brewers ranked Best, Great and Very good. Our editors said it feels like a specialist’s shop rather than a catalogue, which is exactly the feeling a subscriber should have when the next bag arrives.

Escape Coffee in Montreal runs four roast series and gives each coffee a transparency panel listing the price paid per pound against the C-market and Fairtrade prices. It offers twelve grind settings, from Turkish to cold brew, and a sticky add-to-cart bar with size, quantity and price as you scroll. Single O rotates its single-origin range alongside its core blends and prints an espresso recipe (dose, yield and brew time) on each product page.

None of this is subscription design in the narrow sense. But a subscriber who knows the coffee is changing, can see where it came from and knows how to brew it has a reason to stay that has nothing to do with a discount.

What to look at: give subscribers something new to read or try with each delivery, whether that is a rotating range, a numbered release, a recipe or the story of where the product came from.

Subscriptions are not only for things you eat

Most subscription stores sell consumables, and this group is no exception. Two stores show that the model reaches further.

CDLP sells underwear, t-shirts, swimwear, socks and pyjamas, often in Tencel lyocell and merino wool. Its replenishment subscription sits beside a detailed size guide with garment measurements, EU, UK and US conversions and model height, plus fabric notes in plain language. That pairing matters. Someone will only agree to receive clothes on a schedule if they are confident about fit and know how the fabric behaves.

Aardvark Book Club applies the model to books, where the delivery is different every month. Our editors described it as a subscription that feels like an unboxing on screen, with playful 3D, a scroll-driven book reveal and genre discovery driving sign-ups. A companion app for iOS and Android gives members somewhere to talk about each read.

OEM is worth noting here too. Its range covers electrolyte drinks, hand care and incense, and the subscription applies across products you might not normally think of as repeat purchases.

What to look at: if your product runs out, wears out or changes each season, a subscription may fit. But the more personal the product, the more the store has to answer fit, material and choice questions before asking for a recurring order.

Give the subscription its own door

A subscription option on the product page catches people who are already buying. A visible route to subscriptions from the homepage or menu catches people who came to the store looking for one.

Café Binocle’s homepage uses rounded link cards with large arrow buttons for the climate mission and for subscriptions, so the subscription is one of the first things you can click. Single O’s menu sections give drip-bag “Parachutes”, canned oat iced latte, gift kits and equipment their own places, which makes the whole range easy to find for anyone setting up a regular order.

WatchHouse ties coffee retail, subscriptions, brew guides by method and café locations in London, New York and Dubai into one store. It also runs app stamp-card loyalty. Our editors described it as one calm, premium store that feels like the cafés, which is a useful way to think about a subscription for any brand with physical locations: it is the at-home version of being a regular.

POUCH, a US brand making drinkable supplements in shelf-stable pouches, was built by its studio with subscriptions at its core. It includes subscription management and a “Pouch 101” education hub, which gives people the background they need before signing up for something they will take every day.

What to look at: link to subscriptions from the homepage or main menu, not only from the product page, and pair the link with whatever helps people decide, whether that is a guide, a comparison or a brew method.

Where subscription stores fall short

Our editors scored every store on design, usability, creativity and content, and the notes point to problems that recur across this group. Most of them are about information, not design.

On POUCH, the five products sit in a homepage carousel without prices, and no nutrition panel was visible. On Mate Libre and Mode, the nutrition label is shown only as an image. Mode was also missing a collection page. OEM’s collections have no filters and the store has no reviews. Graza’s collection page did not show a product grid when we looked. Aardvark’s book pages show no price and route buying through membership. On Collider, raw template errors surfaced in the cart code.

These matter more for a subscription than for a one-off sale. A customer agreeing to a recurring charge needs to see the price, the nutrition and the ingredients plainly, in text they can read, and they need the cart to work. Several of these stores make up for it elsewhere: SŌM lists each ingredient complex with its dose in milligrams, Mana and Mate Libre carry full ingredient lists, and Cob shows full nutrition alongside its tiers.

What to look at: before you push subscriptions harder, check that every product shows its price, ingredients and nutrition as text, that collections can be filtered and that the cart has no errors. A subscription asks for more trust than a single order.

Which subscription apps they use

Because our Showcase records the apps behind each store, this group gives a useful snapshot of which subscription tools well-designed Shopify stores actually run. We have the subscription app on record for twelve of the seventeen.

Recharge is the most common, on eight stores: Mode Chocolate, Café Binocle, OEM, Assembly Coffee, Mana Yerba Maté, Single O, POUCH and WatchHouse. Skio appears on two, Cob and Collider. CDLP uses Appstle, and Escape Coffee uses Seal Subscriptions.

The apps around them are worth a look too. Klaviyo appears across most of the group for email. Cob runs Intelligems alongside Skio, Okendo and Klaviyo. Collider pairs Skio with Judge.me for reviews, Rebuy and Hotjar. The full app list for each store is on its project page.

What to look at: the subscription app matters less than how the option is presented. Stores on the same app in this group look and sell very differently, because the buy box, pricing and naming were designed rather than left at the default.

Who built them

These seventeen stores were designed and built by a wide spread of studios and independent designers, which makes them useful if you are choosing a partner for a subscription brand. One London-based studio, Dash, built three of them.

• Mana Yerba Maté: Louis Paquet (credited), with development by Michael Garcia and Pam
• SŌM: .RAW
• Cob: MILL3
• OEM: MOUTHWASH
• Mode Chocolate: Sorry Studio (brand and design) and Same Same Studio (Shopify development)
• Single O: Process Creative
• CDLP: coi (full UX/UI redesign and Shopify Plus rebuild)
• Mate Libre: Locomotive
• Collider, WatchHouse and POUCH: Dash
• Café Binocle: Gymnase Studio Web
• Graza: Baggy
• Assembly Coffee: Alicia Blázquez (design)
• Escape Coffee: Tux Creative House, with Louis Paquet and Adrien Vanderpotte
• David Protein: Domaine, with Joel Maynard
• Aardvark Book Club: FUTURE THREE®, with Eduard Bodak and Dylan Brouwer

Every credit, along with the full editor’s note and scores, sits on each store’s project page.

Where to see more

Every store in this article is in the Showcase, alongside the rest of the 100, filtered by country, industry and feature, with each project’s notes, apps and scores. If you run or built a subscription store that belongs alongside these, you can submit it, and brands and studios already featured can claim their pages through membership.