In the Sprwt System, one of our core features is the Subscription/Meal Plan e-commerce ordering systems. With this auto-renewing ordering system, customers will be automatically billed for each week. Additionally, customers can manually select their meals, randomly select their meals, or ignore the selection altogether and still have their meals selected after cutoff. See here for details about auto-selection.
Make sure your Meal Categories (How?), Portion Sizes (How?), and Subscription Groups (How?) are created before you create your subscription.
To create or edit a subscription/meal plan go to Admin Dashboard > Kitchen Settings > Weekly Subscription and click Add New or click on the ID of a plan you want to edit.
You can distinguish your subscriptions based on the different options you would like to give customers regarding
- Pickup/Delivery Dates: if you have multiple dates, and you want to allow customers to choose when to receive their meals
- Billing Period: if you want to offer subscriptions with multiple levels of commitment with price differentiation
- Portion Size: if there are customers who would like meals exclusively in a larger size, so they don't have to upgrade each meal each time
- Meal Category Break Down: if you offer meals that include different categories for different prices.
Within each plan, the prices will be set according to how many meals customers will receive.
In Plan Nickname, be as descriptive as possible so you can identify the subscription internally.
In Plan Name, decide what the title of the choice customers will be shown would be. Note that the customer would have already chosen their renewal preference (manual vs. automatic), plan group, portion size, and billing preferences, so you can keep this name as simple as you'd like, i.e. Weekly Delivery, Monday Delivery, or Entrees only.
In Weeks, fill out the billing period of the subscription. This is how many weeks of food will be added to the customers' subscriptions each time they are billed.
In Renewal Day and Buffer Days to Charge Before Renewal, set the day of the week that customers' payment will be charged, or leave to renew on client buy day.
- If you set the day to Sunday and the buffer to 2, for example, customers will be charged on Friday. If the payment fails, due to an issue like insufficient funds or bank decline errors, the system will try again on Saturday, and Sunday, and if it fails both times, the plan will not renew.
- Note that customers will not be able to select their meals unless they have been charged successfully for that date and the cutoff for that date remains open. For this reason, we recommend you set the Renewal Day to a particular day of the week for all customers.
If this subscription only accepts meals from a particular Portion Size or a particular category as defined by its Group, set those values from the drop-down.
Toggle on and off the Start on days according to when the customer can choose to have the first delivery for this subscription.
- i.e. these subscribers receive meals on Monday and Thursday, can they purchase their subscription to receive the first meals on Thursday, or will they have to wait until the next Monday?
In Sort Display Order, you can force an order during customer display. By default, the subscriptions will be sorted alphabetically according to their plan nicknames, but if you set a value here, the subscriptions will first sort in numerical value. (eg alphabetically, Thursday would appear before Monday. You can set the sort display order for Thursday as 1 and Monday as 0 to switch these.)
Once you save the plan, a section to manage prices will appear.
Click Add Price.
From the customer's perspective, how many days of food will they be receiving, and how many meals per day?
- For example, if you're delivering 10 meals a week, customers are likely consuming them for 5 days per week and 2 meals per day.
Set the Price for one billing period of this subscription.
- If this is a 2 week plan and customers are receiving meals 5 days per week and 2 meals per day, they'll be paying for a total of 20 meals. You may use this spreadsheet as a guide to help you figure out how much your subscription could cost given a standardized price for each meal category.
In the next section, type out how many days of food customers will be receiving on each pickup/delivery day.
- If this is a Monday plan, copy the same number from days per week under Del. on Monday.
- If this is a Monday and Thursday plan, if customers are receiving meals for 5 days per week, you might set Del. on Monday to 3 and Del. on Thursday to 2.
In the final section, type out which categories of meals customers will have to choose from for each day of food's meals.
- If you leave all the values as 0, customers will be able to select any meal on the menu for the meals.
- Otherwise, under each category this pack includes, set a number, and customers will have to select that many meals that are tagged with that category. Make sure your numbers add up to the Number of Meals, and customers will have to select
- If this is an Entrees only plan, copy the same number from Meals Per Day to your Entrees category.
- If this is a Breakfast and Entrees plan, and customers are receiving 3 meals per day, you might set Entrees to 2 and Breakfast to 1.