Subscriptions and loyalty are the two features most likely to make a Shopify store feel like it has been assembled rather than built. Each comes as an app. Each app brings its own widget, its own portal, its own styling and its own idea of what a customer account looks like. The result is a store that works, technically, and feels like three different websites depending on which button you press.
Brew Tea Co had exactly that problem. Subscriptions were clunky, the loyalty programme did not feel like part of the brand, and neither reflected the quality of the tea. The fix was not a different app. It was building the store so the apps became infrastructure rather than interface.
Apps as plumbing, not as pages
Both Recharge and LoyaltyLion do their core job well. Recharge handles the billing, the schedules, the retries and the payment updates that make subscriptions genuinely hard. LoyaltyLion tracks points, tiers and redemptions and keeps that ledger consistent. There is no sense rebuilding any of that.
What neither does well is the front end, because they cannot. An app has to work on every theme, so its widgets are built for the average store and then dressed up with whatever CSS overrides you can get away with. That is where the seams show.
So the approach on Brew Tea Co's store was to use both platforms through their APIs and build every customer-facing part of the experience in the theme. The subscription options on the product page, the frequency picker, the cart, the account area and the loyalty balance are all theme code, written to look like the rest of the site because they are the rest of the site. Recharge and LoyaltyLion do the work underneath and the customer never sees either of them.
A subscription model that fits how people buy tea
The generic subscribe-and-save pattern assumes one product, one frequency, forever. That is not how people buy tea. They want a few different teas, at a cadence that suits them, with the ability to swap a blend next month without cancelling and starting again.
Building against the Recharge API directly meant the subscription flow could be designed around that behaviour instead of around what the default widget offers. Frequency, product mix and delivery timing are handled in a flow that was designed for Brew Tea's customers, then written to Recharge in the format it expects. The billing engine is Recharge's. The experience is Brew Tea's.
Loyalty that feels like part of the store
The loyalty programme is branded as Brew Coins. That name only works if the coins show up everywhere a customer would expect them to: on the product page as an incentive, in the account area as a balance, at checkout as something to spend. A points widget floating in the corner of the screen does not achieve that.
LoyaltyLion's API supplies the balance, the earning rules and the redemptions. The theme decides where and how to show them. The two are not in tension because there is a clear line between what the platform owns and what the storefront owns.
One account area
This is the part that ties it together. Customers can manage their Brew Coins, track orders and change their subscriptions in one place, built as part of the theme rather than handed off to two separate portals with two separate logins and two separate designs.
An account area is where subscription customers spend most of their time with a brand after the first purchase. If that experience is fragmented, churn follows. Building it as one thing was the single decision with the most effect on how the store feels to a repeat customer.
What else was in the build
The rest of the store was built from scratch on Shopify Plus at the same time: a shipping progress bar that nudges towards the free delivery threshold, free gift incentives, Okendo reviews, and Shopify's native search and filtering rather than a third-party search app. Native search is fast, free and good enough for a catalogue of this shape, which is true more often than the app store would suggest.
The whole build took sixteen weeks.
What changed
Brew Tea Co reports net sales up 28 per cent, average order value up 16 per cent and orders up 10 per cent since launch. The subscription flow is smoother, Brew Coins are driving repeat purchases, and nothing in the store is held together with workarounds.
The lesson generalises. If subscriptions or loyalty matter to your business, the platform choice is less important than how it is integrated. Recharge and LoyaltyLion are good. So are several of their competitors. What separates a store that converts from one that merely functions is whether the customer ever notices which app they are using.
If your store has the widget problem, custom theme development is where that gets fixed.
Related service: Custom themes
