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Built for Subscriptions and Wholesale
You've got great coffee and people who appreciate it. Local businesses want a standing order delivered to their office every Monday (fresh!). Customers two states away want the beans they discovered on vacation from the best roaster in town (you, of course).
But taking their orders and fulfilling them — hopefully more and more as word gets out — takes a lot of logistics and the right platform to handle it.
Whether you're roasting out of your garage, running multiple brick-and-mortar locations, or somewhere in between, you need a platform that makes the legwork easier.
Beyond the usual suspects — a secure checkout, a branded website, a way to receive and ship orders — you probably need customizable subscription settings, options for local pickup, and invoicing for your wholesale customers.
You're in luck. There's a platform built for exactly this.
What Coffee Roasters Need From an Ecommerce Platform
A basic ecommerce setup can handle your standard direct-to-consumer orders. But if you're managing a growing subscriber base or wholesale accounts, you need more than the basics. Let's start with subscriptions.
For subscriptions
Flexible delivery schedules. Customers may want a 12 oz bag every two weeks, a one-pound bag each month, or another combination entirely. Your platform should support different products, quantities, and delivery frequencies right out the gate.
Detailed product variants. A single roast might come in multiple bag sizes, grind options (whole bean, coarse, medium, fine, espresso), and delivery frequencies. Your platform should make these choices easy for customers to understand and easy for you to manage.
Customer self-service. Customers need to be able to swap a roast, update a grind preference, skip a delivery, or pause their subscription without emailing support.
Failed payment recovery. Cards expire, get replaced, and occasionally decline. Automated customer notifications help recover recurring revenue without requiring you to follow up on every failed payment manually.
Subscription forecasting and inventory visibility. Subscriptions can make up a big chunk of your order volume, but every customer is on a different cadence — weekly, biweekly, monthly. Being able to see what's coming up helps you plan production, buy green coffee, and roast the right amounts ahead of time. While low-inventory alerts help you avoid last-minute scrambles.
Subscription pause settings. Customers pause subscriptions for all kinds of reasons — travel, too much coffee on hand, budget. As the roaster, it helps to control what happens to paused subscriptions, especially when there are too many to keep track of individually. Being able to choose between auto-cancel or auto-resume, and notify customers of either, helps you prevent surprise charges and lost revenue.
Shipping on subscription renewals. Carrier rates change, so it helps to be able to choose whether to lock in the shipping rate from the customer's first checkout — predictable for them but you may absorb rate increases — or recalculate shipping at each renewal based on current rates.
For wholesale
Selling 12 oz bags on your website is one thing. Supplying cafés, offices, retailers, and restaurants is a different beast entirely. If wholesale is part of your business, here's what to look for from an ecommerce platform.
Private per-customer pricing. Wholesale rates are often negotiated on an account basis. When that's the case, each wholesale customer should see only their pricing when they log in, based on what you've agreed to.
Standing and recurring orders. Many wholesale accounts order the same products on the same schedule. The platform should support recurring wholesale orders so neither side has to remember to place or fulfill them manually.
Flexible fulfillment options. Some wholesale customers pick up from the roastery, some need local delivery, and others need their orders shipped. Look for a platform that supports all three natively.
Inquiry and wholesale applications. Not every visitor to your site needs access to wholesale pricing. An inquiry and approval process lets you vet wholesale customers first.
Invoicing and payment terms. Wholesale customers don't always pay at checkout. They might need an invoice with agreed-upon terms like net 30 or net 60. Automatic invoice generation and payment tracking save you from chasing down payments by hand.
What Merchant Tech Includes for Coffee Roasters
Everything we just covered is built directly into Merchant Tech.
Because subscription management is native to the platform, you can set delivery frequencies, manage product options, give customers control over their orders, configure pause and cancellation rules, choose how renewal shipping is calculated, and automate failed payment notifications without paying for a third-party app or per-order transaction fees on top of your payment processing.
Wholesale is also built in, with private customer pricing, net payment terms, invoice generation, and support for pickup or shipping, all from the same platform.
Merchant Tech also includes the core tools you need to run the rest of your ecommerce business:
- Secure website hosting. Hosting and SSL are included, so there's no separate hosting service to manage.
- Automatic sales-tax calculations. Selling across state lines can introduce different tax requirements. Automatic calculations — plus alerts when you cross a nexus threshold — mean one less thing to monitor.
- Human support for every merchant. There's no "priority" tier behind a paywall. Every merchant has access to the same support team without paying more for faster responses.
White-glove migration if you're already on another platform. A dedicated specialist transfers and configures your storefront, products, SEO information, redirects, discounts, gift cards, wholesale accounts, and subscription data at no additional cost. There's no downtime or interruption to incoming orders, and migrations can be completed in as little as a day. Here's what the migration process looks like.
Compare Shopify and Merchant Tech for Coffee Roasters
Shopify is a well-established ecommerce platform with a large ecosystem of themes and integrations. It offers a free first-party app, Shopify Subscriptions, for merchants that need basic recurring-purchase functionality.
Roasters that need more advanced subscription capabilities may instead use a third-party platform such as Recharge.
Recharge's current pricing, verified July 2026, is:
- Standard: $99/month + 1.49% + $0.19 per subscription order
- Plus: $499/month + 1.34% + $0.19 per subscription order
These charges are added to the merchant's Shopify plan and standard payment-processing fees. Shopify currently lists its Grow plan at $105 per month when paid monthly or $79 per month when billed annually, with transaction fees starting at 2.7% plus $0.30 through Shopify Payments.
So for a roaster using Shopify Grow and Recharge Starter, the ongoing cost includes:
- Shopify's card processing rate (from 2.7% + $0.30)
- Recharge's transaction fee (1.49% + $0.19)
- Both platform monthly fees ($79 + $99)
This doesn't make Shopify or Recharge a poor fit for every roaster. Recharge provides a more specialized subscription option than the basic Shopify app. But it does mean the cost of that setup rises with subscription revenue and order volume.
The Cost Comparison
Let's use a concrete scenario: a coffee roaster with 300 active subscribers, each receiving one order per month at an average order value of $45.
Shopify Grow + Recharge Standard:
| Fee | Calculation | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify Grow plan | Flat | $79.00 |
| Recharge Standard plan | Flat | $99.00 |
| Recharge transaction fee | 300 orders × (($45 × 1.49%) + $0.19) | $258.15 |
| Shopify Payments processing | 300 orders × (($45 × 2.7%) + $0.30) | $454.50 |
| Total | $890.65/mo |
That's $890.65 to process $13,500 in subscription revenue - roughly 6.6% of revenue going to platform costs before a single dollar goes toward beans, bags, or labor.
Merchant Tech:
| Fee | Calculation | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant Tech plan (everything included) | Flat | $79.00 |
| CC transaction fee | 300 orders × ($45 × 2.9% + $0.30) | $481.50 |
| Total | $560.50/mo |
Monthly difference: $330.15. Annual difference: $3,961.80
At 500 subscribers (same $45 AOV), the gap widens:
| Platform | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Shopify Grow + Recharge Standard | ~$1,366/mo |
| Merchant Tech | ~$803/mo |
| Difference | ~$563/mo (~$6,756/year) |
Which Platform Should You Choose?
Choose Shopify if your business depends on specific Shopify tools (i.e. Shopify POS), or if you prefer the flexibility of assembling a highly customized store from third-party tools. Its broad ecosystem can be valuable for merchants with unusual requirements that fall outside the native capabilities of a single platform.
Choose Merchant Tech if subscriptions and wholesale are a significant part of your business and you want them to work natively with your products, inventory, fulfillment, tax calculations, and other commerce operations. The platform includes subscription management in its base price without an additional subscription-app fee or per-order subscription charge, and provides the same priority human support to every merchant.
For a roaster building their subscription program from scratch or frustrated with what Shopify + Recharge costs at scale, it's worth running the numbers against your actual subscriber count and AOV. See Merchant Tech pricing
FAQ
Does Shopify have built-in subscriptions?
Shopify supports recurring purchases through Shopify Subscriptions, its free first-party app, which merchants install and configure. Roasters that need more advanced subscription tools may instead use paid third-party options such as Recharge, Bold Subscriptions, or Loop, adding monthly or usage-based fees to their Shopify plan and standard payment-processing costs.
What is the best subscription ecommerce platform for small coffee roasters?
The best fit depends on how central subscriptions and wholesale are to your business and how much functionality you want built into one platform. Merchant Tech is designed for roasters that want advanced subscription and wholesale tools without paying for a separate subscription app or per-order subscription fee.
How much does Recharge cost for a Shopify coffee subscription store?
Recharge's Starter plan costs $99 per month, plus 1.49% and $0.19 per subscription transaction (pricing verified July 2026). For a roaster processing 300 monthly subscription orders at a $45 average order value, Recharge would cost approximately $357.15 per month before the Shopify plan fee and standard payment-processing costs.
Can I switch from Shopify to another platform without losing my subscribers?
Merchant Tech provides a managed migration with no downtime or interruption to incoming orders. Subscription account information is preserved, and customers are automatically notified and guided through confirming their payment method so recurring orders can continue on the new platform. See how the migration works.
What does a subscription ecommerce platform need to handle for coffee roasters?
At minimum, look for flexible delivery schedules, support for bag sizes and grind preferences, and customer self-service. Stronger platforms also include failed-payment notifications, upcoming order forecasting, automatic sales tax calculations, and controls for renewal shipping and paused subscriptions. These functions should work together without requiring a separate paid app for each part of the subscription management.
Kate Maruyama: Kate is a Senior Editor at Merchant Tech where she oversees content that helps merchants understand platform tools, optimize their online stores, and grow their businesses.
