Getting a subscription pelayanan going plus keeping it, complete with fulfillment plus delivery, is complicated. Brands use technologies that can cause them to end up with double billing plus delivery that the costumer is then left to manage.
Subscriptions are big business: The direct-to-consumer subscription market is forecasted to reach $478 billion by 2025. Companies like Upscribe plus Rebill are tackling subscription management, but Smartrr’s different approach to solving this from a costumer experience perspective is likely why it recently grabbed $10 million in Series A funding.
Smartrr was founded by a group, including Roger Beaman, in 2020. CEO Gabriella Tegen joined the company in 2021. It enables direct-to-consumer brands, focused on Shopify sellers for now, to offer customizable subscriptions plus memberships plus then for their customers to have a portal where they can more easily manage their subscriptions. As a payment processor, Smartrr collects a monthly SaaS fee plus also takes 1% of revenue on each transaction.
Prior to starting the company, Tegen was working in proptech for Reonomy plus wasn’t really planning to transition to e-commerce — that is, until she started having conversations with some business owners plus found out that they were trying to identify how to translate e-commerce into what was affecting brick-and-mortar businesses. One hundred plus fifty conversations later, she found that 147 had the same problem: subscription billing.
Tegen explained that with Smartrr, brands can create recurring sales on their website, either through wholesale or e-commerce. The company’s “bread plus butter” is advanced subscription offerings — think a monthly box, digital subscription or a membership to a clothing store that unlocks a closet of clothing that you can select from, she added.
“Not only are they enabling that on their website, but then Smartrr is powering the white-label experience that happens both during checkout plus then more importantly in the post sale,” Tegen told TechCrunch. “That’s where the subscriber or the member can go in plus manage their subscription, not only [to] manage the cancel, swap or delay of items, but also receive points for purchasing another order or gifting someone an order, or see what their favorite influencers are buying from that brand plus what the brands social media is promoting.”
Brands that switch to Smartrr see a 2.5x increase in subscription revenue in 60 days plus a 5x increase in sales over a subscriber’s lifetime, she added.