What are Sub Contracts?

This section provides a high-level description of a Subscription Contract's features, what its benefits are, and an example of how it can be utilised.

Subscription Status

There are 5 statuses which a customer can be in on Bento:

To understand at a high level why a customer has become inactive which will enable CRM tools to effectively attempt to reactivate them.

Example: If a customer is active and on their next billing attempt their card gets declined, their status will change to suspended whilst Bento attempts to rebill the customer. Once the customer has been successfully rebilled, their subscription will automatically switch back to active.

Delivery Cadence

On a Sub Type, you control the options a customer has available. On a customer's sub-contract they get to choose the option that suits them best out of those available options.

To make your subscription more convenient for customers and support your propositional growth. Traditional subscriptions usually are monthly with limited flexibility so enabling more options means your customers have more control.

Example: A company provides cakes on a subscription basis. Customer 1 may require them on a weekly basis, while Customer 2 may only want them monthly. The subscription option can be customized to allow customer 1 to receive them every 5 days and customer 2 every month.

The anchor date is what the customer initially used to establish the delivery cadence for their subscription. It can also be utilized to modify the day/date on which the delivery cadence for all future orders is generated.

To customise the experience and make your subscription more convenient for the customer. We also ensure that orders sent on the 31st of the month are not adversely impacted on a month without that date, the order simply moves to the last day of the given month.

Example: If a customer receives their widget on the 15th of every month but they want to change the date to just after they are paid e.g. 1st of the month, then this can be done with just a few clicks and all future orders will update to be on the 1st.

Billing cadence is how often your customer will be billed. This is separate from delivery cadence which is how often an order will be delivered. Billing can be either per order or prepaid for multiple orders ahead of time.

What can this be used for:

To provide customers with flexibility, we offer the option to prepay for multiple orders in advance, along with exclusive bulk buy discounts. This feature is especially beneficial for those looking to purchase gift cards to give as presents.

Billing cadence is also very beneficial for a customer who has signed up with a prepaid gift card and then wants to switch to per-order billing once it has run out.

You are also able to change the billing card and delivery addresses for your customer's subscription contract.

Example: A customer can prepay for 6 orders at once. This means a customer will only be charged every 6 orders (regardless of delivery cadence). Or if a customer is given a $100 gift card (for $10 shampoo sub), this means the next 10 orders are prepaid.

Pricing Calculator

The Pricing Calculator allows you as a business to stack different pricing engines on top of each other to support your dynamic proposition.

Line Items

Line items are the products that go into your customer's subscription orders. There are many ways a business might want to control what products a customer gets and Bento is here to support all of them.

What can this be used for:

Depending on your proposition, you may consider sending the identical product to a customer on a monthly basis (such as shampoo) or allowing them to choose from a variety of options (such as selecting from Gousto's weekly recipe collection), or even from a predetermined playlist (such as a world tour of spirits).

Example: Gousto has 80 recipes to choose from each week and a customer signs up for a weekly box. The customer gets to populate their box with 3-5 recipes for every order from the weekly collection available.

Subscription Phases

A subscription phase is a period or chapter of your subscription. What's social is that it evolves over the lifetime of a customer's subscription with complex business rules that can be tailored to the unique needs of your business. Its duration can be controlled by the number of orders (set number or infinite) and its characteristics are the contents and price.

This can be used for creating subscription types that evolve over time. If you want to offer a trial box with a different SKU set or vary the delivery cadences over a seasonal period, all of this can be done within sub-phases.

Example: customer's first order costs £1 and is delivered immediately with 5 SKUs, the second order is £15 and arrives 2 weeks later with 10 SKUs, this continues forever.

Override next box number

This allows you to change what position on your subscription playlist a customer is on and therefore what the contents of their next and future orders will have.

This is useful if you have a set playlist of orders being sent to a customer and your customer has asked to move to another position on the playlist. With a few clicks, you can resolve this for them.

Example: You offer a 12-month set playlist of books. A customer recently emailed to inform you that they have received book 4 and can see that book 5, scheduled for next month, is one they have already read. To resolve this, you can edit their subscription on Bento and override their next order number to book 6. This will shift their entire subscription forward by one order, allowing them to skip book 5 and proceed directly to box 6.

End sub at next payment

This feature prevents Bento from attempting to take payment from a customer the next time their subscription is due to be billed.

This is exceptionally useful for prepaid subscriptions of any kind as it can prevent an unwanted rebill attempt for a customer.

Example: A customer had a 12-month prepaid gift card given to them by their relative. This means they get 12 orders of gin for free, once a month. To sign up they had to enter their banking details but they had no intent to purchase after the 12-month gift card had run out. Traditionally if they forgot to cancel, they might be charged another 12 months' worth of orders, then complain and ask for a refund. By using this feature you can tell our system to not bill the customer once their 12 orders of credit have run out and this can be changed at any point through the subscription.

Discount Code

A discount code/promo code can be applied to a customer's subscription contract and will unlock a £/% discount on one or more orders based on a set of rules. One code can be applied at one time on one contract.

Promotions can be used for many things like acquisition and retention, boosting existing customer engagement, and generating new revenue. With Bento, you can create rules based on subscription type, order number, order price and more.

Example: You want to prevent a customer from cancelling, so you set up a promo campaign that will take 15% off their next two orders if they decide to stay, but if they don't order within 1 month after the promo is applied, it will expire.

There are many more examples of promotional campaigns, get in touch with the Bento team if you would like to discuss them in more detail!