Little Lace Box Changes

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Little Lace Box is making a few changes to their subscription! I’m including the entire letter below and highlighting the most important parts in bold.

tl;dr – Reward points have been added to accounts but reward points won’t work on the new site, so free shipping on shop purchases from now on. Price change for new subscribers due to USPS increase, Little Lace Box now bimonthly to provide the best highest quality box,  make sure you upload high quality images for your canvas print, and oh, Little Lace Box is going to be on Good Morning America and curate a special box for a yet to be named big company!

Here’s what I think – I think the openness from this company is refreshing. They’re committed to producing a high quality subscription and their boxes feel like gifts from a friend. It also feels like a friend is talking to me. Not everyone likes this approach and that’s fine. Most subscription box addicts love this because we’re used to the big behemoth boxes and are looking for something a little more special. I am a huge personal fan of this subscription and definitely understand the growing pains they have experienced with their site. I have had to double what I paid twice just this past year for hosting this site (thousands of dollars go into just keeping the site fast and online). I get it. I can only imagine the headaches with adding an e-commerce platform to a site that gets hammered at the same time every month.  Moving to Shopify (where the e-commerce stuff is hosted for you) is the right decision, even if it means losing the rewards system. Not everyone will understand and that’s fine too, since they’re giving refunds. There are more than a few hidden costs in keeping a large subscription running and I think making sure the customer service experience is the best one possible is the right way to do things. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the next box!

Hello everyone,

We wanted to update all of you on the recent changes you are seeing on the Little Lace Box website.  As many of you are aware, we moved our website from our old host to an entirely new platform and host.  We chose Shopify because of its reputation for being bulletproof and extremely reliable.  And although the entire process is not something we want to do again…ever, Shopify has allowed us to give our subscribers some things we couldn’t before, like PayPal Checkout.  Many of you have been asking for that and now we are able to offer it.  Unfortunately we have also found Shopify to be quite limiting in some areas.  Their claim is that it is a tradeoff allowing them to offer a 99% availability service level.

1)      The LLB reward points have finally been added to your accounts.  You just need to log into your account and you will find your point balance.

With the change to Shopify, we have had to make a number of changes to our loyalty program.

To redeem your points, you now have to claim a coupon (of any denomination shown), copy and paste the coupon code into a special field at checkout and go through the normal checkout process.  This seems like a lot of unnecessary mouse clicks, and you can only use one coupon at a time.

I also think that if you pick a coupon denomination that is higher than the amount in your cart, you will lose the difference (I’m not sure about this because we still haven’t gotten a good answer to that question yet, but I wouldn’t take any chances).

 Shopify does not support points for reviews.  They support reviews, they just don’t allow shop owners to give points for reviews.  This is a BIG DEAL.  We need reviews because it helps us determine what we should carry in inventory.  If a large number of you say, “I would never buy this again,” then we aren’t going to carry it in inventory.  Reviews also make people feel better about buying a product, so they are critical to the success of an online store.

The other obvious issue with this, is that reviews are how most of you get your points.  We want our subscribers to be happy, so we came up with what we feel is the best approach to fixing this problem.  We looked at the average number of points obtained by all of you through reviews each month and that number was 300 points (the equivalent of $6.00).  So we decided that effective immediately we would go to a Free Shipping policy on all store items.  Prior to this, the minimum sale was $50.00 in order to get free shipping (and if you used an LLB Point discount that dropped the price below $50.00 you still had to pay the shipping).  This should save all of you an average of $8.00 in shipping on the average order (the equivalent of 400 points)

If you buy from us once a month, then this change is basically “a wash” in terms of being a benefit.  If you buy from us multiple times in a month, then this is a MUCH BETTER DEAL.

We will still give one point for each dollar spent in the store, and we added the ability to get additional points by referring friends who make purchases.

Although we feel we have created an alternative that will benefit all of you as much as the old review points, we know that some people will be unhappy with this solution.  Regardless of how you feel about this, it’s important to LLB that you understand we had no choice in this matter.  Shopify is not going to change for us, so we had to be resourceful and find another way to be competitive.  If you do the math, this is a much better deal for you.  The problem for LLB is that it doesn’t get us what we need, which is reviews.  So we hope that you will continue to review the products you purchase as well as those items found in your box.

2)      Annual subscribers are still not showing up in our system.  Like the points program, we are at the mercy of the vendor to get these uploaded into our system, unfortunately in their defense, they are writing code to automatically create an account for the annual subscribers who haven’t already created a new account on our website.

This step is necessary in order to do the upload properly.  For those of you who have gone to our site and created a new account, thank you.

If you haven’t already done so, please go to the site and create a new account.  Please use the same email address that you used on our old site, so that all of the historical information matches up properly.

One way or the other, this will be finished next week.  So if you are an annual subscriber, plan on seeing your information populate your account next week.

3)      A Price Change:  Effective April 26th, USPS has announced another price increase for its various services.  We love using USPS Priority 2-Day Mail to ship your Little Lace Box.  The fact that we can ship an LLB on Saturday from Florida and it shows up at the doors of our subscribers, on the West Coast, on Monday, is wonderful.

We have looked at a number of alternative shipping methods in order to cut costs, but we hated all of them, so we decided to stick with Priority 2-Day Mail.  It also means we will be instituting a price increase that will be effective when we open sales for subs again in April.  HERE’s THE GOOD NEWS:  This price increase will only apply to NEW SUBSCRIBERS.  If you currently have a subscription with us, then you didn’t have to read any of section 3 (and I apologize for the 90 seconds of misspent time used to read this section), because it doesn’t apply to you.  Remember the old American Express tagline, “Membership has its privileges”?  Well it’s not a tagline we particularly care for, but in this rare instance it applies.  In the event that you cancel your subscription and want to come back, you will be under the new pricing.  Prices will increase by $10 on a subscription and $20.00 on a one-time box purchase.

4)      Effective in May, we will be changing to a bi-monthly box.  We have come to the conclusion that in order to open up our subscription sales (which have been closed for two months) and provide you with a high-end box each time, we need to give our suppliers (and ourselves) more time.  We thought we’d be caught up by now, but we are not.  For monthly subscribers, this means that after the April box, we will not be charging again until June.

For annual subscribers this means your remaining subscription is now twice as long.  However, we realize this is not what you envisioned when you purchased the annual subscription, nor did you think we would be forced to remove the review points, so if any of you would like a refund for the remaining boxes in your annual subscription, we completely understand.  You don’t even have to say why.  Just send us an email ([email protected]) and we will process a refund and place it back on your credit card.  We wouldn’t make the change to bi-monthly, if we didn’t think it would lead to an improvement in the overall customer experience.

5)      A word about the Canvas prints.  We have received a lot of artwork and images for the March Canvas print offer, unfortunately most of them will not work.  Here’s why, the canvas is a 12 x 12 canvas, so it’s a square.  Most of you have sent in rectangular images, and that will not work on a square canvas, so please crop them into a square prior to sending them to us.  We can enlarge them and crop them, but it’s really not a good idea to have someone else crop your picture.  Also, please do not use anything that you download from the internet, even if you own it.  Here’s why, internet images are typically 75 dpi (low resolution images) and to print, we need 300 dpi, so please send us photos that are taken with a camera and uploaded onto your PC /Mac and then sent to us.

6)      We apologize for throwing so much at you all at once, and I truly apologize for authoring this dull, discursive email, so I’d like to end on a high note.  LLB will be featured on an upcoming edition of GMA (Good Morning America), and we will let you know more as we get closer.  Also, a large multinational company (a brand with which we are all familiar) has asked us to curate a box for a program they are starting.  This box will not be for sale to the public, but instead will be given to customers who make a certain type of purchase (i.e. buy a first-class plane ticket to X and you will get this box as a thank you).  We will be branded just as the curator of the box.  We were flattered to be asked to do it, and will give you more information when we are able.

Thank you again for being a subscriber and friend and have a great holiday weekend.

Team LLB

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