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Comment by xivzgrev | Hacker News Reader

Chewy does this really well, and follows this same advice.

I get pet food on subscription. Chewy sends me a notice my order is about to ship. I can skip or cancel if I want.

Shopify on the other hand is hostile. I have a small store there I've deprioritized. They have a $9 / mo inactive plan, where they keep your stuff but customers can't buy. If you want to stop paying, they delete all of your stuff & domain: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/pause-deacti...

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I suspect those "reminder emails" from Chewy/Amazon etc actually get them MORE sales than they lose by people delaying/cancelling the subscription.

You get an email and you remember you wanted to add something, and you go ahead and buy it.

I've certainly done it both ways. Pushing a shipment back or outright canceling it. I've also added a whole bunch of additional things. In the long run, they still get most of my pet food/toy money.

I’m really reluctant to have a subscription for items where you can’t exactly predict the usage - it’s either too little or accumulates. Having the option to skip deliveries is a must.

Yeah. Chewy's autoship is pretty nice. We have two cats and we've got the quantities and timing to where just as they're going through the last of their current food, the next shipment arrives.

That and we have a subscription box from Meowbox for them as well. We used to get treats, but they didn't like the majority of them so it's just toys now.

This is why I recommend Woocommerce over Shopify, I already have hosting, if I'm gonna try and make some money in ecommerce, might as well try it without having limits. I can have unlimited products/choices on WooCommerce. WP is a shit show, but so is Shopify's subscription model.

Personally, I'd like to see them move to a model where it's completely free until you have 100 sales, then you have to upgrade or something. That would encourage more people to use/try it, plus give them a chance to actually see success and start their small business, rather than fail because they're running out of money for their business.

Yeah that would just encourage the scammers out there. Atomic Shrimp on youtube covers a lot of these scammers. I would say 100 views of the cart by distinct ip addresses to cover people just randomly opening shopify accounts.

Why should Shopify store all your information if you stop paying them? You can export everything you need from your Shopify account. They never offer a free tier to anyone, so it's not like they trick with you a free service and then force you to keep paying to store stuff you created while it was free. The $9/month is a very small amount and a meaningful discount from their cheapest option at $29/month. How is that hostile?

They could store it on aws glacier or something and it would cost them cents per month. They probably do something like that anyway when you cancel as someone said they could restore their shop after having cancelled two years before that. $9 is quite a lot for something that does nothing. I often have side projects ‘I need to come back to some day’ and then 3 years later I think ah… not good if that was 3x12x9. Export is great if you are guaranteed to be able to just import and it will work as before. I don’t see that much; usually exports from years back give a nice ‘your export was done with an older version, sorry’. How does that work with shopify export/import?

None of this is really relevant - Shopify is a paid service, has always been a paid service, and clearly markets itself as a paid service. Just because it's cheap for them to store information doesn't mean you should expect them to do it for you. They only want to deal with paying customers, so when you elect to stop being a paying customer, they get rid of your information. That is a perfectly reasonable business practice - not "hostile" as the comment I was responding to called it.

It is relevant, but as it happens these days, you read only the first line of my comment. I was agreeing with you (I can read longer comments) and was thinking of ways how to resolve it if you want to pay nothing or much less. I never said they have to store anything for free (no one has to) but you can imagine some kind of glacier storage for $9/year or something; it seems they already do that but don't tell you about it anyway considering comments from others.

We’re on HN - we both want free services, but also don’t want them to ever become paid.

It’s a fine line.

Will they also import your data again if you want to reopen store in future?

Actually they retain store data for years. I shut my store down and didn’t pay for a year or two, as I had too much other work on. I later re-opened my account and voila my entire store and data appeared. I was rather grateful.

But you can’t really count on that right? Maybe they stop doing that at some random time and after that cancelled users are not so lucky.

Amazon subscribe and save is the same thing.

I use it for toiletries and other routine consumables at home. Amazon trucks are going to be on the road anyway; may as well save my car trips for actually interesting trips.

I don't trust Subscribe & Save because of Amazon's dynamic pricing. The discount doesn't matter if the base piece tripled because of Amazon pricing shenanigans.

That's a totally valid concern, but Amazon gives you a bunch of opportunity to avoid surprises. They send an email a few days before finalizing your upcoming deliveries, and you can review the price to see if it changed, and either skip a delivery, skip a single product in a delivery, or cancel a subscription entirely.

As a real example: my subscriptions are on a 2 month cycle, and get delivered roughly on the 3rd, which gives me until the 26th of the preceding month to make changes. On the 24th they send an email with all the prices that will be charged if I don't change anything. With almost no friction, I can change or cancel anything up until the 26th.

I have had the price change between the review day and the shipment day. It was less than $2, so I never bothered trying to get the old price. I've since canceled my Prime for a number of reasons, so it's all irrelevant now

I don't trust Subscribe & Save because of how they've tried to dupe me into it for products that clearly aren't subscription-worthy, and how it's pre-selected on items. I can't recall what I was purchasing one time that had "subscribe & save" preselected, but it was something absurd like a dog bed or a nose-hair clipper.

On the flip side when they do that, can't you just take the discount and then cancel the subscription? I think I've done that before.

Has this ever actually happened?

What? Amazon changing prices? It happens every single day. I had something like 25 items in my Saved for Later and every time I logged in at least one and usually 3 or 4 of them had changed price.

No, I'm asking about the situation you described: Do you know of a situation where somebody started a subscription and had the base price triple. I'm not talking about the price of a box of tide pods going up by $1, I mean the situation you're describing where somebody effectively gets bait-and-switched with a 3x price increase.

Yup, at first it seems wasteful to order delivery, but if you go shopping yourself you still end up driving.

I drive car wagon with a large spacious rear area. I limit my shopping trips, I buy in bulk.

You have to be very disciplined to get as efficient with Amazon. It's probably not really possible.

I have 6 neighbors in my cul-de-sac. The Amazon truck probably visits 5 out of 7 days a week. I never worried about whether my Amazon purchases were wasteful based on trucks and fuel. They were quite wasteful in the sense that I bought a lot of cheap crap I didn't actually need.

This is the worst thing about it. Holding something and deciding if it's worth your money is a much longer process than clicking "buy now", and you've probably don't even remember doing it when the goods show up in front of your door.

Just shop with a list and don't break the rule of not buying anything not on the list.

Amazon day is probably similar. There's a designated day of the week where they deliver everything I've ordered that week. I don't have hard data, but it makes sense that if more than one person in my building/block/etc does the same (thus sharing the same delivery vehicle), it's probably less driving/gas overall.

It makes sense, it could look really bad for Chewy. Say your cat got eaten by a pit bull, and then a week later you're reminded what happened by a box of cat food they automatically shipped to your door.

Chewy is famous for sending condolence gifts to customers whose pets died.

tbf I doubt you'd forget about your mauled cat in a week

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