I’m going to break down the technology being used to power Fellow Drops so you can build your own text to order software.
If you aren’t familiar, Fellow Drops is a fantastic coffee brand created by Fellow Products. Each week they send you an offer for highly curated, rare & unique coffee. What makes the service magical is it’s provided completely through text messages.
Once you sign up, you’ll receive a “coffee of the week” deal as a text message. If you see something you like, all you need to do is reply with the number of bags you want to purchase. If the offer isn’t your cup of tea (or coffee in this case), simply don’t reply. That’s it!
The order is processed instantly and a few days later the coffee is at your doorstep. I’ve bought coffee from Fellow Drops myself and the experience is magical.
So how would you go about building Fellow Drops program for your own customers?
The first step to creating shop by text software is to securely store your customer’s credit cards. This allows you to charge the customer each time they authorize a purchase with them having to fill out their payment details again.
Stripe is our recommended service for capturing and storing credit card data. They provide a developer friendly API and with Stripe Elements you can capture credit cards securely without having to worry too much about PCI compliance.
Stripe prohibits selling certain regulated products – like high end cigars – through their service. If you fall into one of these categories, you may be able to use Authorize.net as a payment processor instead. They provide many of the same tools that Stripe does. Their API is harder to work with and their credit card capture service is less customizable but overall it gets the job done.
Now that you’ve captured & stored your customer’s payment information, you’ll want to send them your product offers through text messages.
There are two services that we recommend to send your text messages: Twilio & Bandwidth. Both are going to allow to acquire a texting phone number and send out text messages programatically. We find that Bandwidth has better rates, while Twilio offers more peripheral services and has a more robust API.
The main deciding factor between the two will probably the number that you will use to send your text messages. There are a lot of changes coming to the texting industry with the introduction of 10DLC by the carriers (that’s an article all on it’s own!).
Basically 10DLC will allow you to send high throughput text message (up to 1200 msgs per minute) using a local phone number. There are a lot of unknowns with this product still and the costs appears to be significantly higher than using a toll free number.
For that reason, we would recommend using a toll free number to text out your product promotions. You’ll want make sure the service supports sending image texts (MMS) through toll free numbers – not all services provide this.
Bandwidth has a better toll free texting product so we would give them the edge over Twilio currently.
You’ve tackled the two biggest components of your text to order platform. The next step is to actually process orders that are placed by your customers.
When they reply to your product offer, you’ll be looking for an authorization trigger of some kind. This can be “yes” or a number to indicate how many items of your product the customer would like to order. Once you know the quality they would like to buy, you’ll calculate the order total and charge the customer’s credit card using the Stripe or Authorize.net API.
The order total is most likely more than just multiplying the quantity purchased by the product price. You’ll probably need to figure out the applicable sales tax and shipping fees (if any).
The challenge with text messages is the customer won’t be able to see these charges in real time like they would on an eCommerce site as finalize their order. Because of this it’s best to keep things as simple as possible for your customers. Offer a flat shipping rate if possible or provide an incentive of free shipping if they purchase a certain amount.
If you do want to calculate exact shipping & sales tax for each order there are a few services that can help calculate the taxes & fees automatically.
TaxJar & Avalara provide realtime sales tax calculations via their API . They calculate the sales tax based upon the full shipping address of the customer – not just their zip code. This results in highly accurate sales tax calculations.
Similarly, ShipEngine can be used to calculate exact shipping costs in realtime using their API. You can also send your order information to a platform like ShipStation to easily print shipping labels.
Once the order is complete, you’ll probably want to send the customer a receipt with all of their order details. SendGrid provides a simple way to send transactional emails.
Their template system makes it easy to generate customized emails for each individual order. Simply create the email template beforehand and then pass in the order details as dynamic data for each email. The order details will populate throughout email template and the email – with their specific order – will be sent to the customer.
If that sounds like a lot of work to build in-house software to power your weekly drops, it is. There is a ton of effort that goes into making a seamless checkout process using text messages.
In fact, it's so much work that Fellow Drops switched to AudienceTap after a couple of years running their own in-house platform.
AudienceTap provides a complete Text-to-Buy software platform. It provides all of the features you need to successfully run your own shop by text program:
Interested in learning more? Schedule your AudienceTap product tour today. We are happy to answer any questions about our service and help you create your own shop by text strategy.
