POV: Your customers before Givy
The year is 2023. Your store sells the perfect subscription, which tends to take off around the holiday season, especially over Black Friday. Your customer opens the subscription PDP, and sees a brief mention about sending this subscription as a gift. A few questions flash through their minds:
- Do I need to know their address to send this to them?
- When will they get their first order? What if they’re on holidays when it’s sent?
- Do I need to put my credit card on the subscription to gift it?
- What happens after the gift is done?
- I’m thinking of sending this to two friends, can I do that?
- Will they see the order confirmation email if I use their email address to buy this?
- Can they manage this subscription after I gift it?
They brush these questions off, assuming you have a smooth gifting flow, and add two prepaid subscriptions to their carts.
The checkout page loads – panic! Which email address should they put in? Which shipping address should be used? If my billing address doesn’t match, will this order even work? There’s only one address field, how do I send two gifts?
Aghhhhh!!!! Checkout abandoned.
Gifting on Shopify with Givy
While the situation we described may not apply to all merchants, you can see that there are some obvious questions that merchants must answer to give their customers confidence that their gift will be handled appropriately.
We’re going to highlight the major differences between how Givy handles different parts of the subscription gifting process, vs. how traditional prepaid gifting works today. This assumes that “Traditional” gifting means customers must purchase a prepaid subscription on behalf of recipients.
Recipient Shipping Addresses
Traditional: Recipient Shipping Addresses
Simply put, customers must know the shipping address for anybody they want to buy a gift for. Because of how traditional prepaid subscription gifts work, the subscription app assumes that any new subscription being purchased is for the customer going through checkout.
Also, this means that only a single gift can be purchased per checkout, so customers can’t buy a gift and something for themselves. If they want to send multiple gifts, they’ll need to go through checkout multiple times – not a great experience!
Givy: Recipient Shipping Addresses
Givy has completely changed how gifting takes place, and does not require you to know any shipping information about recipients.
Why? Because our gifting flow sends recipients to a custom redemption page, showing a personalized message, video, and more, and we then send recipients to a prefilled checkout where they enter their shipping information.
This means you can add dozens of gifts to dozens of recipients, as well as products for yourself, and go through checkout a single time. All shipping and billing information is the customer’s, making it extremely easy for them to increase the size of their cart.
Delayed First Order
Traditional: Delayed First Order
When a prepaid subscription is purchased as a gift, the subscription begins immediately, and recipients often have no control over when future orders will be shipped.
This is because most prepaid gifting flows don’t allow customers to set a first delivery date. This means recipients must be home to receive their first subscription order. Not only that, but they won’t receive any notification that the subscription was purchased for them, they’ll simply receive a package out of the blue at their front door.
If recipients are on holidays when that first order comes, too bad! If they need to skip an order, or pause their subscription for a month – too bad!
Givy: Delayed First Order
Givy is different – instead of shipping the gifted product immediately, we allow customers to choose when recipients will receive their gift notification (if emailed). When the email is received, they can click a link to view a personalized message, and enter their shipping information to ship their first gifted order.
This gives recipients full control over when their first order arrives, ensuring that it’s a convenient date for them. It also removes any confusion they might feel about receiving an unsolicited product
Number of Gifted Orders
Traditional: Number of Gifted Orders
When enabling gifting via prepaid subscriptions, you as a merchant must decide the number of orders that can be gifted. Often, merchants will offer standard options, such as 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and call it a day.
This really limits choices for the customer, and may turn some customers away from this option.
Givy: Number of Gifted Orders
Givy’s default gifting modal makes it easy for customers to choose exactly the number of orders they’d like to send to recipients. If they want to limit their gift to 2 orders, or love the subscription so much they want to send 24 orders in their gift – no problem!
We even detect whether the subscription is a prepaid one, and automatically switch the number of orders to 1 in that case.
Can Recipients Manage their Subscription?
Traditional: Can Recipients Manage their Subscription?
In most cases, no. Because the customer generally enters their email address into the checkout, they are the ones who will have the ability to manage the gifted subscription.
If they decide to enter the recipient’s email address at checkout, it’s almost worse! Recipients receive an unexpected email about a new Shopify order, without any context. Even if they figure out that this was a gift, they will now have full control over the gifter’s payment information, and could accidentally opt into upgrades, renewals, etc… using the customer’s billing information.
To be fair, some subscription apps have accounted for these failures, and offer a way for recipients to manage limited parts of their gifted subscriptions. This is a step in the right direction, but still doesn’t allow these recipients to continue their subscription once it expires.
Givy: Can Recipients Manage their Subscription?
Yes! Because subscription gift recipients go through checkout to claim their gifts, they’re creating an account on your store, enter their billing information (even though the subscription is free), and therefore get full control over their subscriptions.
This means things like pausing, skipping, product swapping, upsells, upgrades, etc… can all work for these gifted subscriptions.
But will recipients be ok entering a credit card to claim a free gift? In our experience, this is not a point of friction for recipients. If they’re uncomfortable with doing so, Givy’s redemption page gives recipients an option to convert their gift into a gift card which can be used as cash on your store.
Can Recipients Become Subscribers?
Traditional: Can Recipients Become Subscribers?
This is one of the highest points of friction in this model’s flow. The only way for recipients to become long-time subscribers is by marketing to them at the end of their gifted subscription, and hoping that they’ll go through the entire process of becoming a new subscriber. Merchants often include large incentives to convert these customers into actual subscribers, and the conversion rate on these emails is not great.
This is because recipients have not created accounts on the store, and have not entered any billing information to continue their subscriptions.
Givy: Can Recipients Become Subscribers?
Yes! When recipients claim their gifts, they become new customers on your store, and you store their billing information on file for any potential future payments.
When their last gifted order is created, Givy has a built in email to notify those recipients that their gift has expired, and that they will begin getting charged on their next order. This email can also be sent via Klaviyo or Omnisend if desired.
This means that 100% of recipients become paying subscribers on your store, unless they choose to cancel the subscription before their first gifted order. Smart merchants can look out for these events, and choose to incentivize those customers with a renewal discount.
Multiple Gifts in One Checkout
Traditional: Multiple Gifts in One Checkout
Because customers must enter the recipient’s shipping address at checkout, it’s only possible to send a single gift in a single checkout. This becomes painful if a customer wants to send several gifts at once.
Givy: Multiple Gifts in One Checkout
Yes! Our gifting modal makes it very easy to either send multiple gifts to one recipient, or multiple gifts to multiple recipients, all in the same checkout.
Not only that, but customers can also do some shopping for themselves. Because of the way our gifting flow works, an unlimited number of products can be added and sent to anybody.
Recipient Email Addresses
Traditional: Are Recipient Email Addresses Required?
In traditional prepaid, it really depends on how the subscription app has configured the gifting flow. If they don’t allow the recipient to manage their subscription, then an email address is not necessary for gifting. If they do allow recipients to manage parts of their subscription, then an email address is required to send the gift.
Givy: Are Recipient Email Addresses Required?
Givy’s gifting modal offers three ways of sending a gift. The most popular is via email, which sends a personalized email to the recipient on the date of their choice. In this case, of course, an email address is required.
If the customer doesn’t have the recipient’s email, or wants to send the gift another way, we offer two alternatives.
Send via Unique URL
This will send the customer a unique link starting with givy.me which will send the recipient to their redemption page with their custom message. This is great for sending gifts via SMS message, WhatsApp, or any other way of communicating digitall.
When selecting the option to print, customers will also be sent an email containing information on redeeming their gifts. This email can be printed and included with a card in person.
Risk of Chargebacks
Traditional: Are there Risks of Chargebacks?
While we don’t think the risks are big, traditional prepaid gifting asks customers to enter their own billing information, then shipping information for a recipient who may be in a different country or continent.
This makes it possible that the customer could challenge the charge with their credit card provider, and potentially get a refund for a legitimate gift.
Givy: Are there Risks of Chargebacks?
While we can’t promise that there is no risk when gifting with Givy, we can say that we never require that billing and shipping information are mismatched at checkout. We believe this slightly reduces the risk of orders being flagged as fraudulent, or of chargebacks occurring.
Personalized Gift Message
Traditional: Can a Personalized Gift Message be Sent?
In general, all of the traditional prepaid gifting options we’ve seen have not had a way to let recipients know that they’ve been sent a gift. In our opinion, this is a big problem, and can leave the recipient feeling confused if they don’t hear from the customer before their first gift arrives.
Givy: Can a Personalized Gift Message be Sent?
That’s our specialty! Givy is all about the gifting experience. Our default gifting modal lets customers send a custom message, an animated GIF (which can be hilarious), and a video message that can be recorded from their mobile devices.
Recipients will open a redemption page displaying all of this information, along with clear instructions on redeeming their gift, and an option to convert their gift to a gift card.