There seems like a ton of subscription businesses around and I almost feel there might be room to create a white/gray-label platform that can handle the website, subscription management, payment and shipping labels to potential operators of these kinds of services.
Wondering how big the addressable market is.
UPDATE: http://member.ly already does this according the child comments - awesome!
As a tea neophyte, I strongly suggest that you add a link to recommended equipment for brewing loose-leaf tea. I have considered trying to get into tea several times, but could never figure out exactly what I should buy if I want to brew loose leaf tea. (I'm sure I could find something, but I only like buying things off of recommendations.)
This could do 2 things for you:
1) You could earn some money off of an affiliate program.
2) People like myself who are new to tea are unlikely to subscribe to your service without some help. Tell me what I need to enjoy tea (include brewing directions if they don't come with your tea), and I'm much more likely to subscribe.
I would specifically recommend that you recommend a single product with a direct link—not a type of product or brand.
I'm still a bit of a newbie myself, but one thing to consider is how much tea you want to brew in one go.
If you're drinking high quality, delicious tea, I don't think you'll want to settle for only one cup at a time. But the more you brew, the more leaves you need to use.
It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but let's say you use one teaspoon of leaves for one cup of tea, you can't just steep the same amount of leaves longer to get one liter of tea. But you can brew whatever amount at a time, several times. I think the "10 - 15" times on teapeat.com is exaggerated. It's probably closer to 5, and even then, the taste kind of changes along the way.
I brew something like 7.5 deciliters ( http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/science ) of tea at a time, and that gives me roughly three nice-sized cups. But I need to use roughly four teaspoons of leaves for that.
If you want to get serious about enjoying high quality tea (and who wouldn't!), you might want to invest in a water-boiler that lets you set the temperature. Almost no quality tea can be brewed at 100C.
For Japanese sencha (my favourite type of tea), it appears that roughly 70C is good, which just so happens to be the temperature I get from my water boiler when I ask for 80C. A lucky coincidence.
Another choice you need to make is the kind of teapot you'll use. A glass pot looks pretty with your lovely green tea in it, but will break into pieces when it slips from your hands when you're washing it. True story. A stainless steel pot won't break, and will keep your tea warm for a long time. Then there are other kinds, like cast-iron pots, ceramic ones, etc. I've got a steel pot now, and I'm quite happy with it.
Thanks. I will definitely do that. I actually thought about selling tea "equipment" through the site but for it to be economical I would have to buy a decent quantity. Using an affiliate program may indeed be the better option at this point.
Yeah, we're invite only right now so our sales & sign up flow is only given to people we let in. There's an application form if you're interested.
The pricing isn't a secret though, just not advertised. Memberly takes 5% (like Kickstarter) and then Amazon takes their payment processing fee which varies according to volume but is typically 2.9% + $0.30.
Not yet, we're focused on the provider workflow side of hte product at the moment. The discovery end will come later, when we have more momentum. We're only working with providers that drive their own traffic right now.
Yes, that could be useful and I could consider switching to such a service if it was available. I would worry though about giving total control over my subscribers to some outer service that might hike up their prices suddenly.
It would be nice though if someone else dealt with all the different payment buttons, subscription management and just wired me a lump sum monthly and sent the PDF for address labels that I need to print out for shipping.
I could use a cheaper sending option and that would really boost the profit. That would introduce an initial delay for the subscription start, but of course after that it would not be noticeable for the subscriber.
One time I was experimenting with sending first package using airmail and subsequent packages simultaneously using the cheaper shipping option that was supposed to be 2 weeks slower. But in reality the slower one arrived first and the faster one a day later, leaving subscribers confused.
It would seem that the next wave of movement to web services will be SAAS services that address larger business side services like shipping and piece-meal manufacturing, but I'm not sure how that is going to be done.
I sent Amazon one pack of candy and then shipped it through them to see how it would work and what it would cost. Had no trouble with the service itself, but it adds a slight cost for me since I have to ship to Amazon and then pay for shipping again.
I sold a pack of candy there for $9.90. After Amazon's fees I got $5.60. Someone bought it from Amazon.com instead of me dispatching it through the API, which would have cost more. The cost for me to buy that candy was $2.05 and shipping it to Amazon cost $4.20.
Of course in reality I would ship much larger amounts, but then there would be new fees too since I would need to clear customs and pay import taxes.
Also it seems we have to attach some kind of label with a bar code to each individual candy because they don't have a normal UPC code so that the Amazon system can deal with it. Biggest killers for me from using this is having to clear customs and that they won't send you the money for your sales unless you have a US bank account.
The barcode you mention links your specific merchant account to the physical product's UPC/ASIN in order to properly track your inventory. Amazon can also handle the labeling of the inbound inventory for an added fee.
The checklist on the packing slip seems to indicate that I need to do something for each item: http://i.imgur.com/yyJXf.png
The first item is "ALL items are covered with the correct FBA stickers". So actually that is not necessary, and if I just buy a huge pack of candies and ship it to you with only this single packing slip on the big box containing many candies, then you can still sort things out?
If you are subscribed to the labeling service, absolutely. If not, the fulfillment center may do it as a courtesy. The most important issue is what the FC expects from your shipment. Any unplanned or unexpected prep activity will cause your items to be sidelined in order to continue the inbound process for all of the other shipments. If a massive shipment comes in that isn't labeled/labeled correctly the FC may elect to ship it back due to things like space considerations or man power needs to handle the prep.
Sorry for the delay in replying. Feel free to pm if you have any other questions.
Personally, I wouldn't because it's too specific to the particular goods being sold and thus can't easily be abstracted. Coffee is going to need to be handled v differently to candy or women's shoes.
I would offer a service up to the point of providing the labels and packing slips to the merchant and let them execute the fulfillment themselves.
My guess is that for most 'normal' people the website, payments and subscriber management aspect is the most difficult part of the operation to run so it seems best to focus there.
http://member.ly looks great. I recently launched http://sockpanda.com, and this would have been great to have when we started out. I wonder whether their choice of payment processor (Amazon) vs. PayPal/Stripe/etc has any effect on conversions. Also I'm curious if anyone has tested whether offering only the set-it-and-forget-it option like candyjapan and sockpanda do (and not having a finite-term subscription options like the member.ly sites) might get the average subscriber to stay on longer (people get used to receiving the items and don't bother to cancel).
NetPlenish works on more or less exactly this idea: creating subscription service for delivering common products. Their service launches pretty soon, let's see how much traction it gets.
There seems like a ton of subscription businesses around and I almost feel there might be room to create a white/gray-label platform that can handle the website, subscription management, payment and shipping labels to potential operators of these kinds of services.
Wondering how big the addressable market is.
UPDATE: http://member.ly already does this according the child comments - awesome!