1) Reporting needs for this level of sophistication – there was nothing available on the market:

Like Pipsticks, many subscription brands rely on Shopify data, Recharge subscription data as well as their own operations/customer data. It was challenging for the Pipsticks team to achieve an accurate view of performance given the inconsistencies across each data source. We couldn’t find any tools available on the market so we decided to custom-build our own solution through Supermetrics reporting over a few months of trouble-shooting and fine-tuning.

2) Making sense of all the data in a complex business model:

With a complex model such as Pipsticks, we had to carefully sort between one-off orders, subscription orders, gift orders, and wholesale orders across all data sources and then investigate the current inaccuracies between their existing reporting tools before we could even determine the final solution here to the reporting challenges.

3) Finding the right balance of spend each month

Balance is the operative word here as you can push out as many subscriptions focussed ads as you like but you can’t control whether those visitors will end up purchasing a one-off purchase or a subscription purchase so it required careful monitoring and daily tracking and adjustments to our approach. This is especially true when you factor in a low-priced item like stickers for one-off purchases and how long you might need someone on a subscription for before you start making a profit there.