Over the past two years, Smarter and Shopify Plus agency Presidio have collaborated on a variety of projects, including brands like Stix and Ouai. Seeing immense subscription success and growth throughout our partnership, Presidio’s Stanley Sigalov joined us for a conversation on website development, implementing subscriptions, and the success of our mutual clients. 

On average, brands that have launched subscriptions with Presidio and Smartrr have seen:
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• Average order value across brands increasing on average by 26%, with an AOV of about $90.
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• Active subscriptions growing on average by 10x, with some even up to 15x.

“The talking points for Smartrr are: it’s an easy integration on our side, we can make it look good and fairly quickly, features are great out of the box, and their support has been great in our experience. We trust them to always get back to us quickly and fix anything. It’s an easy setup — I’ve never had trouble guiding a client through it.”
— Stanley Sigalov, Director of Client Services

About Presidio

Presidio is a leading Shopify Plus development firm specializing in design, platform migration, theme development, and conversion optimization. With experience in supporting over 500 Shopify stores throughout the past ten years and having thousands of merchants choosing their Shopify themes, the Presidio team members are experts in engineering. The agency focuses on three main areas — custom eCommerce sites, ongoing site optimizations, and Shopify app and theme building — describing themselves as extensions of their client’s teams aiming to help them launch, maintain, and optimize their eCommerce websites.

About Stanley

Holding ten years of consulting and Shopify development experience, Stanley Sigalov joined Presidio over three years ago as the Director of Client Services. Basing his entire work philosophy on customer empathy, Stanley strives to “be the agency partner who is accessible, casual, and easy to work with.”

Through these ten years of website development and eCommerce experience, Stanley and Presidio have found themselves with deep knowledge of the subscription space. Covering projects across all industries from automotive parts to retail to medical products, Presidio has found skincare and women’s retail brands especially drawn to their agency — the perfect pairing for subscriptions.

Presidio Meets Smartrr

Having primarily worked with a legacy subscription app in previous years, Stanley was introduced to Smartrr in the early stages of the company during a project and felt that our teams aligned almost instantaneously. Stanley was impressed by Smartrr’s level of support, which made it easy for him to refer clients and forge a strong partnership.

“Once we were introduced to Smartrr, our dev team was really comfortable with how you guys operated and your code structure — so we thought now that there’s an alternative, maybe we should start using this instead.”
— Stanley Sigalov, Director of Client Services

When evaluating options for a subscription partner, Stanley called out two things they keep in mind: the feature set and ease of implementation — which is exactly what Smartrr solved for them.

Presidio’s Partnership With Smartrr

Presidio’s extensive website development talents in tandem with Smartrr’s robust feature sets have proven to be immensely valuable for DTC brands on Shopify. Throughout the past two years of our partnership, brands on average that have launched subscriptions with Presidio and Smartrr have grown active subscriptions on average by 10x, with some even up to 15x, and have increased their average order values by 26%, seeing AOVs of about $90.

Throughout Stanley’s partnership with Smartrr, he has had the opportunity to dig into the entire suite of tools that Smartrr has to offer, and called out three features as being his favorite:

1. Customer Account Portal

2. Gifting

3. General Ease of Integration and Styling

“Because you guys support your clients on a very human level, give Slack access, and are on standby, it’s a lot easier for me to say how I trust this big portion of your business — especially because a subscription app is the single biggest investment that a brand makes.”
‍— Stanley Sigalov, Director of Client Services

Looking Ahead

Beyond simply recommending Smartrr as a subscription partner, Stanley shared valuable advice for agencies searching for a subscription app, emphasizing the importance of deeply understanding every aspect of the platform; Stanley described that, “Everyone wants subscriptions, but no one thinks through the second, third, or fourth step of what that means for the end user and the company’s support team…Dive into the platform and really understand all of the features, the limitations, and the code before you start making those pitches…I want to be in a position where if I’m on a call with a client interested in subscriptions and I’m pitching subscriptions to them, I can seamlessly open up a test shop, show them the exact feature set, and show them how the code is cleaner.”

Looking ahead, Stanley, as well as the Presidio team, plans to focus on building out more formal processes for auditing and being more proactive with clients. Especially as the eCommerce industry continues to change, the team plans on playing an active role in their clients’ workflow, such as recommending features, doing site speed checks and ADA audits, and conducting active quality assurance.