Blog

For a long time now, Blend has had the pleasure to call ReCharge one of our most valued partners. Our relationship has gone from strength to strength; working together on projects, webinars, blogs, and expos.

Like with most companies, here at Blend we are really missing ‘in-person’ events, and one that we would have loved to have on our agenda this year was ChargeX. ChargeX is held by ReCharge, and was one of the largest events in the ecommerce year. This year was very different from the rest, and was held virtually at the beginning of September.

Organising a virtual event is certainly not easy, as it is difficult to build up momentum in the same way that in-person events do. ReCharge did an incredibly fantastic job with this year's event despite the difficult circumstances, and were still able to display some of the fundamental updates that are coming up. ReCharge used this opportunity to showcase significant product updates. Their main focus is to empower merchants through subscriptions.

In the past year, ReCharge have scaled up their workforce, with their product team growing by 4x and their engineering team increasing by 3x. This goes to show just how dedicated they are in ensuring their customers are being looked after in the right way.

The following are some of the most significant product announcements made by ReCharge during ChargeX.

Customer Portal

The customer portal is the home for subscribers to manage the relationship with you and your brand. It’s where the customer can see all the details of their subscription. ReCharge have created a new customer portal based on themes. You can now preview and choose themes that can be customised to match your store. It is simple to use, as the templates of the themes have already been designed for you, so you don’t need to spend time on planning how to lay out your pages.

The first theme to be released is called ‘Novum’. This was put together after analysing thousands of current customer interactions. The results showed that customers wanted something easy to navigate and that looked fresh and new. It also looks great on mobile and has a built-in revenue protection section, where customers can choose their own shipping and payment dates.

As a Shopify merchant, the Novum theme is a fantastic addition to your store. It has been created with the goal of increasing revenue in mind. There is the function now to allow customers to ‘order now’ a repeat subscription of an item they have run out of, without waiting for their next shipment. It also has a new feature called ‘Quick Adds’. This allows customers to quickly and easily add more products to their current subscription.

ReCharge are in the development stage of their next theme, which will hopefully be released by the end of 2020.

For more details see: https://rechargepayments.com/features-customer-portal/

Insights

Collecting data is imperative to any business - the more information you have on your customers and their buying habits, the more it will help you to sell products that appeal to them. ReCharge already gives plenty of opportunity in supporting your business to gather data, and with their recent updates they have improved this even more.

One of the ways to see how users are finding your store is through UTM Parameters. This is done by adding UTM tags on to the end of the URL, which will then be tracked each time the site is visited to show where the customer was directed from. Recharge has enabled this data to now be tracked and stored via the customer charge and subscription.

Google Tag Manager can also now be added to any of your pages, which is a great way to collect data on your customers behaviour, and use it for remarketing purposes.

Rearchitecting the Platform

Not every update is front end; there is also lots going on behind the scenes. ReCharge have been investing in rearchitecting the platform, to ensure it is reliable and scalable. They also have a team dealing with ensuring the platform is entirely secure.

A fast site speed time is imperative to a successful site. The updates made to the theme engine have seen results over 30+% faster for page load times, which is a phenomenal result, and will heavily assist the customer journey.

ReCharge have now updated the charge processing, so that it is unlimited. This means that charges can be completed quicker and earlier in the day. This will help with scalability - as the business grows the charge processing can keep up with this increase in sales volume.

API’s and Webhooks

Headless commerce is taking over e-commerce. ReCharge are doubling down on their API and Webhooks to enable the merchant the power to customise the store to enhance the customer experience.

They have now established their One-Time Products API, whereby customer loyalty and spend is increased by giving them the opportunity to add one time products to their existing subscription. By adding in these one-time product promotions to SMS and email marketing, this tempts the customer to add the additional product to their shipment.

For more details see: rechargepayments.com/features-one-time-products/

Quick Action

Quick Actions are standard URL’s, that when clicked perform an action on an account. These are easy to add, and there are lots to choose from. For example, add a URL for reactivating a subscription, order now or applying a discount. These make the customer journey so much simpler, and will therefore persuade them to purchase more.

The other benefit of Quick Actions is how easy it now is to bring these actions into email marketing, via the integration with Klaviyo. By sending these emails to customers, it is reminding them of your brand and making them feel special. It also reduces your churn rate, as it makes it so much easier for customers to restart old subscriptions or to add on products, and can heavily increase the overall AOV.

Focus on Data

One of the biggest updates to come from ChargeX is the amount of work ReCharge have conducted this year on data and analytics.

The analytics that ReCharge have focused on are those that deliver insights on how to optimise your store and give a full view of your ecommerce business, in order to deliver a successful growth strategy.

The data can be used to gain insights on customer engagement, segment customers based on their product selections and purchase patterns, improve product recommendations, give useful insights on how media influences contribute to your subscription revenue and measure how effective the marketing efforts have been. These will all give you as a merchant a much more in depth understanding of how well your business is performing.

They also rolled out the ‘Benchmarks Dashboard’ for the first time during ChargeX. This helps you to track your key metrics, such as LTV, churn and AOV against your industry benchmarks, to outline if these are similar to your competitors.

For more details see: https://rechargepayments.com/features-enhanced-analytics/

The above updates are all instrumental in the growth of your business, and at Blend we would highly recommend adding ReCharge to your store. We work alongside ReCharge on a number of current projects, and are always eager to add more to the portfolio. To find out more please contact us on the following: