Monthly Product Swapping helps merchants using the surprise and delight business model, where a customer subscribes to a product and will receive a different product every month.
How does it work?
Watch the video demo here
autoMate's Product Swapping feature allows merchants to create a Product Schedule. Within a schedule, the merchant defines a Trigger product and allocates a product or variant ID to each month of the year.
When an order is placed for the Trigger product, autoMate will automatically update the next queued order with the product that matches the month of their next delivery.
For example, if a customer subscribed in September, their next queued order will be for October. autoMate will check the product ID in the schedule for October and update that queued order with the specified product.
How to get started
Once you have installed autoMate and connected your ReCharge account, you will be able to create your first schedule.
Defining the Trigger product
The first step to creating a schedule is allocating a trigger product ID or variant ID. This is what the customer will order on the website when they first subscribe. autoMate uses this trigger product to identify which schedule that customer belongs too and therefore allocates the correct product for next months delivery.
Go to Product Schedules on the main autoMate menu and select Add new schedule. Then you can define the trigger or triggers that will be assigned to this schedule:
A schedule can have multiple trigger products and you can have a mix of trigger products and variants.
Setting up the schedule
The next step is to allocate one product per month for this schedule. To do this, you can select Choose product and pick from the product picker within the app.
The product is linked to the month of year and each subscriber receives the same product in that month. Once you have assigned a product to every month, you can simply click save and that's it!
Please note, autoMate will not retrospectively update the queued orders of active subscribers. autoMate will only take over from the subscription at the point a webhook is received, which is in three scenarios:
1 - A new order is placed for a trigger product
2 - A subscription is renewed or another order is processed for a trigger product or that months product
3 - A subscription is updated with a trigger product. This can be either a merchant going into ReCharge admin and swapping that customer to a trigger product or a customer going into their account area and swapping to a trigger product.
Until one of these 3 scenarios happening, autoMate wont perform any actions on the subscription.