We recently rebuilt swisswater.com on Shopify 2.0. If your store is running on a legacy theme, here’s what that actually means for your team.

The Short Version

Legacy Shopify themes give you one editable page: the homepage. Everything else (product pages, collection pages, about pages, landing pages) is locked into a fixed template. Want to add a section to your about page? That’s a developer task. Want to rearrange your product page layout for a seasonal campaign? Developer task. Want to tell a story about a new product that goes beyond the default fields? Developer task.

Shopify 2.0 opens all of that up. Every page gets the same drag-and-drop flexibility the homepage always had. You can add sections, move them around, and build new page layouts without touching code. It’s a bigger deal than it sounds.

What it Looked Like for Swiss Water® Process

Swiss Water® Process talks to two very different audiences. Consumers exploring and buying roasted decaf coffee, and trade professionals sourcing green coffees. The old site tried to serve both with one rigid template. Neither audience was getting what they needed, and updating anything meant calling a developer.

On Shopify 2.0, we built a kit of custom content blocks. Hero sections, graphical blocks, team spotlights, trade-specific modules. Their team can mix and match these across any page on the site. New roaster partnership? They build the page themselves. New micro lot worth highlighting? Same thing. No ticket, no queue.

Sections on Every Page

This is the single biggest change, and it’s easy to overlook. On a legacy theme, if you want your product page to include an origin story, a roaster profile, and tasting notes in a specific order, someone has to code that template. And if you want a different layout for a different product? Another template.

On Shopify 2.0, those are all sections. Add them, remove them, reorder them. Per page, not per template. Swiss Water’s coffee pages now include origin details, flavor profiles, and roaster information, and the team can adjust what shows up on each one.

Metafields Without the Workaround

Legacy Shopify stores handle extra product data through apps, custom code, or API workarounds. Things like origin country, processing method, flavor notes, certifications. All of it required a developer to set up and maintain.

Shopify 2.0 lets you create and manage metafields right in the admin. Swiss Water’s coffee products carry detailed origin and flavor data that their team can update themselves. When the data lives in metafields instead of hardcoded templates, it stays consistent and easy to maintain. It also opens up filtering. Swiss Water’s shop page lets visitors sort by origin, flavor profile, roaster, and more, and because it’s all driven by metafields, the team can update the filters as their catalog changes.

App Integration that Doesn't Break Things

On legacy themes, installing a Shopify app usually means injecting code into your theme files. Uninstalling it means cleaning up that code, sometimes manually. Over time, themes collect leftover code from apps that aren't even active anymore.

Shopify 2.0 apps integrate through the theme editor, not the code. You add them to specific pages, position them where you want, and remove them cleanly. Your theme stays clean.

Is it Worth the Migration?

A Shopify 2.0 migration is an investment. It means rebuilding your theme, not just updating it. For Swiss Water, that was the right call because we were redesigning the entire site anyway. The brand had just been transformed, and the website needed to catch up.

But even without a full redesign, the migration is worth considering if your team is regularly waiting on a developer to make content changes. Or if you’ve got product data that’s hard to manage. Or if your site feels like it’s fighting you every time you try to do something new.

The question isn’t really about Shopify versions. It’s about whether your website is a tool your team can use or a thing only a developer can change.

Swiss Water’s team is publishing new content, updating product pages, and building new landing pages on their own now. That’s what 2.0 actually gives you. We design and build Shopify stores. If your site is due for an upgrade, here's how we work.

The number one thing new clients tell us when they start working with Needmore is some version of the same problem: a competitor—sometimes one doing objectively worse work—is getting more recognition, more credibility, and more sales. They can’t figure out why.

The answer, almost every time, is design.

The most ambitious specialty coffee businesses invest far more in design than you realize, because they know that every single interaction someone has with their brand is shaped by design. And if that design is uninspiring, every one of those interactions is a missed opportunity.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about coffee: it’s not much to look at! Roasted beans are brown. Someone who isn’t a coffee expert can’t tell much beyond how dark the roast is. The same goes if you're processing green coffee, importing, or building equipment. The product alone can’t tell your story.

So when someone has a brief, passing exposure to your business—a bag on a shelf, a website, an Instagram post, a wholesale pitch deck—the opinion they form is based almost entirely on your design.

Every interaction can move a potential customer closer to you or push them away. There’s not a lot of neutral ground here. If your design doesn’t make a positive impression, it’s making the wrong one.

Think about the coffee brands you look up to, the ones that are genuinely successful. How many of them have arbitrary or sloppy brand design? Maybe a couple… but the vast majority have very considered, very intentional design. That is not a coincidence.

A square label slapped on a white bag. A Shopify template with a few colors swapped out. These things don’t move anyone. Every interaction just evaporates. Nothing compounds. Your customer isn’t any closer to buying from you, recommending you, or even remembering your name.

This is where most people get it wrong. They think of design as the last step, the packaging you put around a finished product. You nail the sourcing, you dial in the roast, you build out the business, and then you “get some design done” like it’s a coat of paint.

But design isn’t decoration. It’s strategy made visible.

When a roaster has a clear point of view, good design makes that point of view legible to people who will never visit your roastery or cup your coffee. It tells the story you don’t get to tell in person. It does the work when you’re not in the room.

And when a roaster doesn’t have a clear point of view, design exposes that too. A generic brand isn’t just a missed aesthetic opportunity. It’s a signal that you haven't figured out what makes you different. Or worse, that you have figured it out, but you can’t communicate it.

The brands that win in specialty coffee aren’t winning because they found a better illustrator or picked a trendier typeface. They’re winning because their design is doing real work—positioning them, building trust before the first conversation happens, and making every touchpoint compound instead of disappear.

If your design isn’t doing that, it’s not just underperforming. It’s working against you.

AI bots are eating your website alive.

Not in the dramatic, sci-fi sense. In the very boring, very expensive sense of automated systems hammering your server thousands of times a day, downloading your entire website—every navigation menu, every stylesheet, every script tag, every cookie banner—just to extract the text on the page. It’s like sending a moving truck to pick up a letter.

An Expensive Problem

Dozens of AI systems now crawl websites constantly, looking for content to answer questions and power the tools that more people are using every day. This is fundamentally different from how Google’s crawler has worked for the past twenty years. Traditional search crawlers were relatively polite, fetching the HTML, indexing the text, and moving on. Modern AI bots are more aggressive. They come back more often, they follow deeper links, and some of them execute JavaScript and simulate full browser sessions just to read one page.

According to WP Engine’s traffic trends report from December 2025, AI-driven bot traffic now consumes up to 70% of the most costly dynamic hosting resources. AI crawlers quadrupled their traffic share in just eight months during 2025, with OpenAI’s GPTBot alone growing by 305%. Kinsta actually changed their entire billing model in November specifically because bot traffic was making customers’ bills unpredictable.

This hits WordPress sites especially hard. Every time a bot visits a page, your server has to wake up PHP, query the database, assemble the page from your theme templates, load all your plugins, and deliver a complete HTML document — often 500KB or more — just so the bot can throw away 98% of it and keep the plain text.

The Industry Response

Over the past few weeks, a wave of solutions has appeared from Cloudflare, Vercel, Laravel Cloud, and the WordPress ecosystem, all converging on the same idea: what if we just gave the bots what they actually want?

The answer is markdown, a simple plain-text formatting language. Just content: headings, paragraphs, links, and lists. No navigation bars, no JavaScript, no CSS, no cookie consent popups. A bot sends a request indicating it’s fine with markdown, and the server responds with a lightweight text version of the same content. Human visitors still see your normal website. Nothing changes for people.

Cloudflare’s implementation, launched February 12th, showed an 80% reduction in data transferred—a blog post that consumed 16,180 tokens as HTML dropped to 3,150 as markdown. Vercel reported even more dramatic numbers: a typical blog post weighing 500KB shrinks to just 2KB as markdown, a 99.6% reduction in payload.

What This Means for WordPress

WordPress sites bear the brunt of the problem because every page request triggers server-side processing. A static site doesn’t feel the pain as much, but a WordPress site with WooCommerce, a handful of plugins, and dynamic content is doing real work every time a bot comes knocking. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of bot requests per day, and your server is spending most of its time serving robots.

We can already help with this. If your site is using Cloudflare to help serve content, offering markdown is one click away. If not, Joost de Valk's Markdown Alternate plugin is a WordPress-native way to offer this. We can help configure it for unique types of content, but it works out of the box for posts and pages.

And it’s not just about the money. When AI systems can efficiently read your content, your site has a better chance of being cited in AI-generated answers. There’s emerging evidence that markdown content produces better results in AI retrieval—one analysis found 35% better accuracy when AI systems work with markdown versus raw HTML. Making your content easy for these systems to consume is becoming as important as traditional SEO.

We Can Help

While this is all very new—much of what I’m citing here is about a week old—it’s already well worth considering. If you have questions about any of this, or if you’ve noticed your hosting performance degrading and suspect bot traffic might be the culprit, get in touch. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re here for.

I was thinking about the difference between Native Instruments and Ableton as music companies after someone on Reddit asked if Ableton was in “good shape”. Both are Berlin-based, both were founded in the late 90s, and both have had over 25 years to figure out what they want to be. The paths they've taken couldn't be more different.

Native Instruments spans an almost absurd number of product categories. They make DJ software and controllers (Traktor). They make MIDI keyboards (Komplete Kontrol). They make drum pad controllers and grooveboxes (Maschine). They sell one of the most sprawling software bundles in music production (Komplete, with over 150 instruments and effects). They're in a lot of different spaces.

Ableton, on the other hand, has been around almost exactly as long and yet feels so much more focused. Effectively, at this point they have four products:

1. Ableton Live, their flagship music software
2. Push, the hardware controller they've been iterating on since 2013
3. Move, a portable groovebox released in late 2024
4. Note, a companion app for iPhone

It took Ableton roughly 25 years to get to those four products. Their bread and butter has always been Live. But what's striking is that every one of those other products feeds directly back into it. Push is a control surface for Live. Move captures ideas that sync to Live. Note sketches beats that open in Live. Every product they ship makes all the others more valuable. Owning the hardware doesn't just complement the software — it deepens your investment in the whole ecosystem.

Native Instruments has been in most of those same markets for years. But there's no real synergy between them. If you own their DJ gear, sure, you‘d want Traktor. But nothing about that makes you more inclined to pick up a Maschine or a Komplete Kontrol keyboard. The products exist side by side, not interlocked. And NI has never quite been seen as the premium tier in any of those categories — just present in all of them.

I remember buying a Maschine years ago because I'd been trying to decide between the NI ecosystem and Ableton‘s. Right around that time, Ableton released Live 10, which featured a significant visual overhaul — updated vector graphics, a new custom typeface, thinned-out interface elements — all designed so the UI could scale cleanly to any display resolution. It was the kind of deep, unsexy infrastructure work that signals a company thinking in decades, not quarters.

What was wild about the Native Instruments experience was that their software still wasn't Retina. It looked like something from the early 2000s on a modern display. And sadly, under the hood, a lot of it still was — NI's codebase for products like Traktor and Reaktor stretches back over 20 years. You could feel the age. It didn't feel like a company investing in the important stuff long-term. It felt like a company that would rather ship new sample packs on a schedule than modernize its foundations.

Sure enough, NI just entered preliminary insolvency proceedings in January 2026 — a German restructuring process overseen by a court-appointed administrator. And while their newest releases like Maschine 3 and Kontakt 8 have finally added HiDPI support, much of their software catalog still looks pixelated on a top-of-the-line MacBook in 2026. That's not just a technical shortcoming. It's a tell.

I ended up returning that Maschine and spending the extra on an Ableton Push. I was immediately glad I did. Ableton Live is basically as good as it gets for music production software. And the company clearly feels like it's in this for the long haul — they're still pushing firmware updates to the original Push from 2013, because when you only have a few pieces of hardware, you can afford to keep investing in them.

If you can tell the difference between a company playing the short game and one playing the long game, you probably already know who you should be doing business with.

When I was younger, like in junior high school, pixel art was all there was. Pixel art was computer art. I loved pixel art and I loved thinking about it, probably for similar reasons that I love drawing imaginary maps and inventing configurations for railroad routes.

For my final project in computer class in junior high, I made an animation with my friend Adam which required me to fill out pages and pages of meticulously colored-in graph paper and write hundreds of lines of DATA statements containing the X-Y coordinates of each pixel we wanted to draw. This was on a very primitive Apple II computer, so the so-called pixels were either green or black, and this was written in Applesoft BASIC. I think we could only address 40×48 blocks on the screen, which we treated as pixels.

As a grown-up designer, I spend my time making vectors. Vectors are kind of the goal of any designer because they can scale to any size without losing quality—whereas pixel art, of course, does not work that way. Designing for the web was originally a pixel sport, but over time it's become more and more vector-oriented, which is great.

But for all my vector work, I've always spent a lot of time in the terminal. This is the interface anyone around in the '80s would recognize: you type in commands and it runs programs. I do a lot of this because I'm not only the lead designer at our studio but also basically a programmer and IT guy. And I've probably spent more time in the terminal lately rather than less, because I've been using command-line tools like Claude Code.

The way a terminal interface is designed hasn't really changed. It's based on a grid of characters, with every character having the exact same width. While more characters have become available over time—symbols, emoji, and so forth—the premise hasn't changed.

As you type commands, things scroll upward, and the grid is replaced by new grids of characters. You don't think in terms of the pixels that make up the characters. You just think in terms of a grid of characters.

Which doesn't exactly lend itself to graphics.

But I was making a command-line tool and looking for a way to show at least a primitive preview of each image being processed.

Obviously, if I had 10 rows available for the image, I could choose a color for every cell and fill in those 10 rows across, say, 20 columns. But that would be an extremely low-quality image and probably hard to implement. Surely, in this day and age, there has to be something better.

Well, it turns out there is. There's a library called Chafa that handles exactly this: give it an image and a few parameters, and it will output that image as best it can in your terminal. It works great. But how it works is really interesting to me.

So obviously you could fill in the character cells as I've described. Fine, though quite rough. But on any modern terminal, you can use symbols that fill in half-height blocks—the Unicode block elements ▀ and ▄—which creates a rough pixelated image. Using my example of having 10 rows of text available, this trick effectively gives you 20 rows of pixels. You set a foreground and background color for each character, filling in only the top or bottom half with the foreground color while the other half uses the background. It's a simple trick, but it doubles the vertical resolution. Now we're getting closer to something usable.

But it doesn't stop there. Decades ago, someone came up with a format called Sixels. Sixels—short for "six pixels"—consist of a pattern six pixels high and one wide, giving you 64 possible patterns (2⁶). It basically replaces your character set with a different set that can render primitive graphics. This method was developed for DEC terminals in the 1980s, and it works surprisingly well compared to half-height blocks—quite a bit more detail. Very respectable.

But it actually doesn't even stop there, because some terminal emulators support native image rendering through their own graphics protocols! Kitty has one; iTerm2 has another. I'm not entirely sure how it works at the protocol level, but it outputs an image that is pretty much pixel-accurate in your terminal. If you're using the right terminal app, it looks exactly like a photograph floating by along with all your text.

Best of all, Chafa intelligently uses the best method available. If I run my app in Kitty, I see photo-realistic images. If I use the default macOS Terminal, which only supports half-blocks, they look more pixelated—but still pretty good.

Working on the command line is as useful these days as it's ever been. Fun hacks like this always make it new and interesting for me.

All images courtesy Hans Petter Jansson, author of Chafa.

One of the things I notice most quickly when working with large language models is how bad their judgment is.

I don’t mean they get facts wrong, though they do. I mean something more specific: when faced with a choice, they almost always make the wrong call.

Here’s how it typically goes. I’ll ask Claude Code to evaluate a space for me—maybe a set of command-line tools for something I’m trying to accomplish. It will research the options, gather details, and eventually present a summary. “Here’s all the choices, and here’s the one I would use.” It always does this; it’s probably trained to.

But here’s the thing: I almost never agree. If it’s a multiple choice, I’m nearly guaranteed to pick something different. It’s not that I’m contrarian—it’s that the model seems to lack whatever faculty makes one option obviously better than another. It can enumerate trade-offs. It just can’t weigh them.

I suspect this is deeply related to how these models are trained. They’re given tasks and rewarded for completing them. They’re goal-oriented in the most literal sense: they want to finish, to produce an output, to give you something. When presented with a choice, they pick whatever gets them to done.

But good judgment often means not doing something. Saying no. Recognizing that the elegant solution isn’t worth the complexity it introduces, or that the popular tool has a design philosophy that’s going to fight you in six months.

Apple famously “says no a thousand times” to protect the products they ship. Working with agentic AI requires the same discipline—except you’re the one who has to say no, over and over, because the model won’t.

I’m surprised how often I write what I think is a clear description of a task, only to discover partway through that Claude made a quietly bad decision early on that I now have to unwind. You get better at catching these, but it feels like a parlor trick—specialized knowledge about how to work around a tool’s limitations rather than knowledge about the actual work.

If you talk to these models like you’re talking to a capable colleague, you’re going to end up with their judgment baked into your projects. And their judgment, right now, isn’t very good.

I was reading up on New Hero which is a font from Newlyn that we’ve been using in some projects lately, and I was really impressed by one of its accessibility features.

Compatible with the W3C initiative, New Hero includes an accessibility character set for organisations wishing to follow these guidelines. These fonts not only enhance compliance on the web, but are also important to UI/UX, broadcast media and signage design and demonstrate corporate social responsibility.

Basically the design of the font includes a few letters that are specifically tweaked to be much easier to read and distinguish.

I love this because we value accessibility a ton and do a lot of work to make sure that what we build is accessible. It’s a nice touch to have a font that can support those goals.

Sometimes the best feedback arrives unexpectedly. When we sat down with Eddie and Izzy from Eurotubes recently to discuss their new site, they mentioned something that interesting: they'd been humming along nicely and hadn't even announced the redesign yet.

"People are just kind of stumbling into it," Eddie told us, describing how customers discovering the new site organically have been offering unsolicited praise. "By and large, everybody's just kind of blown away."

The Quiet Revolution

There's something beautifully honest about this soft launch approach. No fanfare, no email blast, no social media campaign. Instead, musicians searching for tubes, landing on the site, and finding themselves pleasantly surprised by what they discover. The aesthetic, the usability, the fact that search actually exists now (after a decade without it).

"First off, there was no search" on the old site, Eddie emphasized. "That's just night and day. I use it all the time. When I'm working with a customer, I need to find a piece of information, I use the search."

The Order of Magnitude Shift

The phrase that resonated most from our conversation was Eddie's assessment of their operational improvement: "We're already an order of magnitude better."

This isn't incremental improvement. It's transformation. From multiple clicks to process an order to streamlined batch processing. From zero inventory tracking to full QuickBooks integration. From a multi-page checkout maze to a single, elegant page.

For context: this is a business managing 780 products with over 15,000 variations. The scale alone would break most systems. Instead, theirs sings.

The new Eurotubes site has been live for a few months now, quietly serving musicians who care about their tone. We're proud to have been a part of a project that speaks for itself, one blown-away customer at a time.

At Needmore Designs, we've been using Basecamp to manage our projects for years—it's the backbone of how we collaborate with our clients and keep our work organized. But as developers who spend most of our day in the terminal, we found ourselves constantly switching contexts between our code editors and web browsers just to update a todo or post a quick message.

That's why we built bc4—a command-line interface for Basecamp that brings project management directly to your terminal. Today, we're excited to open-source it and share it with the community.

Why a CLI for Basecamp?

If you're like some of our team, your development workflow revolves around the command line. You git commit, run tests, deploy code, and manage servers—all without leaving your terminal. But updating project status meant breaking that flow to open a browser, navigate to Basecamp, find the right project, and make your updates.

With bc4, you can now:

# Mark that bug as fixed without leaving your terminal
bc4 todo check "Fix login validation bug"

# Post a quick update after deploying
bc4 campfire post "Deployed v2.3.1 to production 🚀"

# Create a new todo while you're thinking about it
bc4 todo add "Refactor **authentication** module" --due 2025-01-20

That’s great and all, but Basecamp has a great web interface. Most people have zero need for a command line tool. But for some users, and some use cases, it’s fantastic…

How We Use bc4 in Our Workflows

Here are some real examples from our daily work:

During code reviews:

# After merging a PR, update the corresponding todo
git merge feature/new-design
bc4 todo check 12345

In deployment scripts:

# Notify the team when deployments complete
./deploy.sh && bc4 campfire post "Production deployment complete!"

For quick status updates:

# When starting work for the day
bc4 todo list --list "This Week"
# See what needs attention without opening a browser

Managing multiple client projects:

# Quick project switching
bc4 project "acme corp" # Finds and sets the ACME project
bc4 todo add "Review new mockups"

I particularly love being able to make a prompt for my command line agent tool that takes a whole list of todos or cards, and intelligently triages the whole list. It can be a fantastic time-saver.

Built for Developers, by Developers

We've started with bc4 with features that make sense for developer workflows:

• Markdown Support: Write in Markdown, and bc4 automatically converts it to Basecamp's rich text format
• URL Shortcuts: Copy any Basecamp URL from your browser and use it directly—no need to extract IDs
• Multi-Account Support: Seamlessly switch between different Basecamp accounts, and pick one to be your default
• OAuth2 Security: Your credentials are stored securely, never in plain text

Easy Installation for Mac Users

If you're on macOS, installation is as simple as:

brew install needmore/bc4/bc4

For other platforms, check out the installation instructions on GitHub.

Giving Back to the Community

We built bc4 because we needed it, but we know we're not alone. Many developers and agencies use Basecamp, and we hope this tool makes their workflows a little smoother. By open-sourcing bc4, we're giving back to the community that has given us so much through countless open-source tools we use every day.

The project is MIT licensed and available at github.com/needmore/bc4. We welcome contributions, bug reports, and feature requests!

Get Started

Ready to bring Basecamp to your terminal? Check out the project on GitHub for detailed setup instructions and documentation. Once you've tried it, we'd love to hear how you're using bc4 in your workflows.

Happy command-lining!

We're thrilled to share some exciting news: Needmore Designs has officially become a WooCommerce Pro Agency Partner! This recognition represents more than just a badge—it's a validation of our two-decade journey crafting exceptional digital experiences for specialty brands.

Early Adopters to Pro Partners

Needmore's relationship with Woo began at the very beginning (we've been using the platform since it was first released in 2011). As early adopters, we recognized the potential of Woo to perfectly marry our love for storytelling with the e-commerce needs of our specialty clients (check this 2014 interview I did with the Prospress team about why we are drawn to WooCommerce ). 

Over 14+ years, we've developed an understanding of how WooCommerce can be tailored to serve the complex workflows and tell engaging stories.

Our early success with WooCommerce Subscriptions proved the platform's potential for specialty brands. When we helped Picky Bars transform their Google spreadsheet subscription system into a seamless WooCommerce-powered experience, they saw a 150% increase in subscription sign-ups in just 3 months. This project exemplified our belief that subscription commerce works best when it reflects the authentic community around a brand—a philosophy that has become central to our approach.

Sharing Knowledge with the WooCommerce Community

Our commitment to the WooCommerce ecosystem extends far beyond client work. Needmore has been a prominent voice in the community since the very beginning, sharing our expertise on the conference stage at three historic WooConf events:

• WooConf 2014 in San Francisco - speaking at the very first WooCommerce conference (video), helping establish the foundation of what would become the premier gathering for the WooCommerce community
• WooConf 2016 in Austin - presenting How to Elevate Brands with their Unique Voice (video) on the legendary Austin City Limits stage
• WooConf 2017 in Seattle - delivering a keynote address (video) to the developer community 

A Portfolio Rooted in Craft & Commerce

Since 2004, we've been deeply embedded in the specialty food and drink worlds. What sets our WooCommerce work apart is our anthropological approach to web design. We practice participant observation, which means engaging deeply with our clients and their products in various settings. For a coffee roaster, this might mean understanding the cupping process. For a wine maker, it's learning about terroir and vintage characteristics.

Our portfolio tells the story of brands we've partnered with and seen flourish. Many of these were built on the WooCommerce foundation, such as:

• La Marzocco Home: Bringing the legendary espresso machine maker's premium experience online
• Sweet Bloom Coffee Roasters: Creating a sen­so­ry dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence where excep­tion­al cof­fees inter­twine with mean­ing­ful nar­ra­tives of jour­ney and impact
• Ritual Coffee: Creating a digital home for one of San Francisco's most beloved coffee roasters
• Literary Arts: Supporting Portland's literary community with a thoughtful online presence
• Tao of Tea: Illuminating the journey from leaf to cup through thoughtful design
• Oren's Coffee: A complete brand transformation with a WooCommerce-powered website that captures the electric heartbeat of New York coffee culture

Each project represents our philosophy: websites should tell memorable stories and inspire action, whether that's discovering a new coffee origin or setting up a monthly subscription. This deep engagement allows us to craft digital experiences that don't just sell products—they communicate the passion, craft, and story behind every item in the catalog.

Looking Forward

Becoming a WooCommerce Pro Partner isn't just recognition of our past work—it's a commitment to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in specialty e-commerce. We are excited about the opportunities ahead!  This Pro Partner status means our clients benefit from:

• Direct access to WooCommerce's latest features and updates
• Priority support channels for complex implementations
• Enhanced collaboration with the WooCommerce team on challenging customizations
• First access to beta features that can benefit specialty retail
• Recognition that they are working with WooCommerce experts

Celebrating with Coffee (Naturally)

As we celebrate this milestone, I'm reminded of why I love this work: every website we build helps thoughtful brands tell their stories with clarity and depth. Whether it's a small-batch roaster in Portland or an established tea company with decades of history, we're here to craft digital experiences that honor their craft and connect them with customers who value quality.

From our first WooCommerce site to achieving Pro Partner status, this journey has been about more than code and commerce—it's been about community, craft, and the stories that make specialty brands special.

Here's to the next chapter of brewing excellence in e-commerce!

Back in 2006, we built a coffee rating website for a 24-hour Rails Day competition. It was simple: rate your coffee, remember what you liked. Back then, it felt novel—one of the first of its kind.

Fast forward to today, and I’m rebuilding it at Cuppin.com. What started as a fun way to use a domain we’d been sitting on became an education in how dramatically coffee culture has evolved. Here’s the thing: we’ve been designing for coffee companies this whole time at Needmore. But working with coffee businesses versus being deep in home brewing culture? Totally different worlds.

Here are five lessons from the journey (so far).

1. Coffee Got Serious While I Wasn’t Looking

The first thing that hit me? I don’t know modern coffee anymore.

Well, that’s not quite right. I know the business side—Needmore works almost exclusively with coffee clients! But the home brewing side? That evolved into something less recognizable while I was busy designing for industry players.

When I was deepest in home coffee culture 25 years ago, your brewing options were limited: get an espresso machine, make a French press, or do a basic pour-over. That was pretty much it.

Today it’s a different world entirely.

People are treating their water with specific mineral profiles. They’re measuring extraction yields. They’re following brewing recipes with the precision of laboratory protocols. I’ve had AeroPress coffee that rivaled good espresso—something I wouldn’t have believed possible back in the day.

There are entire websites dedicated to collecting recipes for individual brewing methods. The level of precision and care that home brewers bring now makes my old “coffee snob” days look positively casual.

Lesson: Your domain expertise has a half-life. What you knew deeply can become outdated faster than you think.

2. Capture Everything That Matters (Not Just What You Think Matters)

When I started rebuilding the service, I thought I knew what to track: coffee name, roaster, score, maybe some origin details and tasting notes. Simple, right?

The first feedback I got: "Can you add recipes?"

It was so obvious in hindsight. I subscribe to a monthly espresso service, and every shipment includes the roaster’s specific recipe—dose, yield, time, temperature. This tells you how to pull a shot that tastes how the roaster intended. If someone’s recording a coffee they loved but not how they made it, the data is incomplete. What if they found a modification that made it even better?

I was asking for the brewing method, but that tells you almost nothing. It's like asking what kitchen you cooked in instead of what recipe you followed.

Lesson: Listen to early users obsessively. They'll show you the gaps between what you built and what actually matters.

3. Maybe Skip the Beta

This might be controversial, but I’m starting to think the whole “closed beta with invite codes” thing was unnecessary friction.

My reasoning for the beta was classic developer paranoia: What if the data models change? What if I need to restructure everything? Better to limit the damage, right?

But here’s what actually happened: I haven’t had to make any destructive changes. Modern migration systems handle schema evolution gracefully. The friction of invite codes probably cost me more in lost users than any data migration headaches would have.

Lesson: Perfect is the enemy of launched. Your infrastructure is probably more resilient than your anxiety believes.

4. Coffee Data Is a Fascinating Mess

This is where things get a bit philosophical. How much structure should you impose versus letting things be freeform? Should you be able to write a recipe like you write a blog post... or should every ingredient and step be its own series of inputs?

Take time input for recipe steps, as an example. If someone types “90” for a step duration, do they mean 90 seconds or 1:30? (They're the same, but people think differently.) I built a parser that handles both, plus things like “1:90” (which becomes 2:30... just for good measure).

Or processing methods—at first, I had one single grouping. Then I realized coffee can have multiple: washed at origin, then decaffeinated later. Is decaf just a toggle, or another processing method? (It's another processing method.)

The really tricky part is collaborative data. If User A adds a coffee but only knows the roaster, can User B add the origin info later? What if they disagree? I ended up with a "first person locks the field" system—not perfect, but it prevents chaos, and allows the data to improve over time organically.

Lesson: Real-world data is messy. Embrace the mess, but create smart constraints to keep it useful.

5. Switching Costs Are Real (And That’s Okay)

Here’s the sobering truth: There are tons of coffee apps now. It's not 2006 anymore.

People have notebooks full of reviews. They’ve paid for AeroPress recipe apps. They have communities on Reddit or Discord where they share their experiences. Even if Cuppin is “better,” is it better enough to justify moving years of data?

This isn’t defeatist—it’s liberating. Instead of trying to be everything for everyone, I can focus on building exactly what I want. The people who find value in that specific vision will come.

Lesson: You can’t compete with switching costs. You can only offer something different enough that starting fresh feels worth it.

The Meta-Lesson

Building Cuppin (again) taught me that the best side projects exist at the intersection of three things:

• Something you used to know (provides foundation)
• Something that’s changed (creates learning opportunity)
• Something you personally need (ensures you'll keep going)

The gap between my 2009 coffee knowledge and 2024 coffee culture forced me to become a beginner again. That discomfort? That’s where the interesting design decisions live.

Your Cup Awaits

Cuppin’ isn’t fully launched yet, but it’s getting there. Every feature I add teaches me something new about how coffee culture has evolved—and how much more there is to learn.

Despite what I said earlier, you do presently need an invite code! Visit cuppin.com and use NEEDMORE as your code to get an early peek.

Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the best insights come from the people actually using the thing.

Building Websites for the Long Haul

About a decade ago, I often found myself enthusiastically pitching to clients the ambitious goal of building websites that would comfortably last at least ten years. It sounded a bit audacious, and at the time, I scribbled myself a reminder: check back on this. Well, here we are.

Fast forward a decade, and it turns out we achieved exactly what we'd hoped. We're proud to see a number of those websites still humming along beautifully, serving their purpose just as intended all those years ago. 

To the uninitiated, ten years might seem modest. But anyone who's been in web design understands that ten digital years are closer to a century in tech terms. Reflecting on the technology and best practices from a decade ago feels like leafing through a very old yearbook—familiar yet astonishingly dated. Some of the original tech is no longer actively maintained. Yet here they stand, robust as ever. And, of course, we've carefully replaced any truly mission-critical components over time and updated look and feel along the way.

Lessons from Patagonia

Thinking about this reminded me of a beloved Patagonia jacket I own, distinctive in its mustard-yellow hue. It's wonderfully comfortable but unfortunately tears easily if it encounters something sharp—like the thorn bush that snagged mine. A small rip quickly led to the down filling making its escape.

What sets Patagonia apart is their lifetime repair guarantee, a testament to their commitment to longevity and sustainability. I brought my jacket in, and a couple of months later, it returned with a patch sewn onto it. Initially, I felt slightly disappointed. The patch didn't match perfectly, a subtle shade off from the jacket's original color. I was surprised.

But as I wore it more, something changed. The jacket, patched and imperfect, began to feel uniquely mine. It wasn't just repaired—it was enhanced, embodying a story, a history, and a commitment to longevity. This is a unique jacket.

The Wisdom of Iterative Improvement

In web design and software development, there's a valuable lesson here. There's a temptation among developers to scrap everything and start anew—an enticing proposition akin to moving into a brand-new home, full of promise and free from old baggage. Yet seasoned developers often warn against this impulse. Starting over is risky, costly, jostling to customers, and rarely as straightforward as it seems.

Just as Patagonia didn't discard my jacket but thoughtfully repaired it, websites and software projects often benefit more from careful, iterative improvements rather than radical overhauls. Piece by piece, code can be refactored and optimized, evolving gradually into something fresh and improved.

Guiding Clients Through Change

Our longstanding relationships with clients have allowed us the privilege of guiding them on this journey, letting them know precisely when a strategic update or careful refinement makes more sense than a complete rebuild. It's easier on budgets, gentler on stress levels, and ensures that the essence of what makes their site unique remains intact.

At Needmore, we've always believed the best digital experiences aren't just visually striking today—they're thoughtfully constructed to evolve gracefully over time. Like that patched Patagonia jacket, the websites we create carry their history proudly while continuing to serve their essential purpose.

So here's to websites—and jackets—that are built not just to last but to gracefully age, evolving beautifully over time. Curious about building something with staying power? Let's talk about creating digital experiences that endure.

By the time Needmore turned twenty, our WordPress install felt like one of those charming Victorians on Portland’s east side: overflowing with character—right up until you fire up the espresso machine and the lights flicker. Thirty-seven plugins, two rival page builders, and a steady drip of security patches kept the whole studio on edge. We wanted a site that spoke to how we build today—crisp content models, quick pages, and a workflow that doesn’t require spelunking through a dashboard just to swap a headline. Craft CMS offered the blank canvas we wanted.

We began with content modeling. Instead of cramming every idea into one giant WYSIWYG, we mapped out the blocks that show up in nearly every case study—hero images, process galleries, pull-quotes, responsive multi-column text. Craft’s matrix fields let us package each pattern in its own tidy wrapper, so an author can snap together a page like Lego bricks, no code required. Rebuilding each portfolio entry with these new blocks was downright fun.

This time around, we wrote the site from scratch. Previous iterations on WordPress leaned on commercial templates—heavily customized, sure, but still burdened by the 90 percent of the iceberg you never see. Now we have a lean build: just the markup we want, images optimized the way we want, and an experience that shows exactly what our team can do.

Design stayed deliberately restrained. We resisted the siren song of a full visual overhaul and focused on letting last year’s style decisions sing while keeping the spotlight squarely on the content itself. Turns out “design is how it works” really does, well, work.

The payoff is measurable. Google now hands us a tidy 100 across accessibility, best practices, and SEO—scores we used to chase with an armful of WordPress plugins. Craft, being a true content-management system, lets us fine-tune every element and enforce best practices at the moment of entry. Page-load times are roughly half what they were, plugin bloat is down by nearly ninety percent, and every Core Web Vital has flipped to green.

The best part, though, is qualitative: publishing feels inspiring again. Instead of babysitting updates, we’re telling stories about coffee roasters, typography experiments, and the occasional DJ side hustle.

This year, we had the incredible opportunity to reimagine and bring to life a vibrant new look and feel for Swiss Water® Process to be unveiled at the Specialty Coffee Association Expo in Houston. From a bold, inviting booth experience to coffee sample labels, detailed process cards, and witty stickers, every element was designed to celebrate Swiss Water®’s positioning: clever, trustworthy, friendly, and passionately coffee-driven.

Our goal was to create an immersive environment where storytelling could seamlessly blend with design, inviting attendees to engage deeply with Swiss Water®. The booth was envisioned as a vibrant, welcoming gathering and coffee sampling space, instantly recognizable through its fresh colors and dynamic wave patterns.

We designed new coffee sample labels and process cards to clearly and beautifully articulate their chemical-free decaffeination process. The playful stickers we created—“Calm Vibes Only” and “Today we drink, tonight we sleep” and “It’s 2pm Somewhere”—captured the brand’s warmth and wit.

We loved seeing attendees interacting with our designs, engaging with the new storytelling elements, and experiencing their refined yet accessible character firsthand. It was truly rewarding to watch our combined creative vision unfold at SCA Expo.

Thank you to Swiss Water®  Process for entrusting us with your brand story and being such thoughtful collaborators—and to everyone who stopped by and experienced our work in Houston!

With tariffs implemented by the current U.S. presidential administration—ranging significantly from 10% up to 46% presently—the specialty coffee industry is experiencing substantial pressure on pricing. Many countries crucial to coffee production have been directly impacted. As coffee roasters navigate these increased costs, transparency has become more vital than ever. We believe coffee roasters should clearly and proactively communicate the impact of tariffs on their e-commerce platforms.

Why Tariff Transparency Matters

Transparency isn't just an ethical choice; it's a strategic advantage. Coffee customers today care deeply about the integrity and sustainability of their purchases. We've seen impressive energy behind price transparency in the last few years (for example, we worked with Guilder Coffee to showcase their Ask Me About the Cost of Production guide and have helped a number of roasters add production costs to their websites).

Tariffs have become a new and significant driver of coffee costs. Clearly indicating tariffs helps consumers understand the real cost of their coffee, fostering trust and loyalty. Transparency also distinguishes a roaster’s brand by showcasing authenticity and openness about how global economic factors shape their business.

It also helps customers to understand that political choices have consequences, because they can see those consequences in action.

Two Approaches to Tariff Transparency

There are two primary ways roasters can present tariff-related costs: by explicitly itemizing tariffs as separate costs, or by integrating them into prices with clear explanations.

Approach 1: Explicitly Itemized Tariffs

Clearly itemizing tariffs separately provides maximum transparency. Consumers can directly see how tariffs impact coffee prices, offering an educational opportunity about global trade issues. This approach empowers customers by providing more insight and awareness into some supply chain issues.

Approach 2: Integrated Tariffs with Clear Callouts

Alternatively, roasters can integrate tariff costs directly into their listed prices, supplemented by clear explanatory notes or callouts on product pages. This method simplifies the shopping experience, ensuring customers encounter no unexpected charges at checkout. Aesthetically, it preserves a clean and minimal design, appealing to many specialty coffee brands.

Special Considerations for Subscription Customers

Subscription models complicate tariff transparency slightly, but also offer unique opportunities. Subscribers must be clearly informed about how tariffs influence their recurring costs. Roasters could adopt flexible pricing that adjusts to tariff changes, clearly communicating these adjustments well in advance.

Sending out a newsletter to subscribers, offering details and the rationale behind the price changes, is a smart and proactive choice. Transparency here is crucial for maintaining trust and avoiding unpleasant surprises.

Implementing Tariff Transparency on WooCommerce and Shopify

Currently, neither WooCommerce nor Shopify offers comprehensive built-in tools specifically tailored to displaying tariffs transparently. However, both platforms are highly customizable, providing a starting point for tailored solutions.

Implementation may involve:

• Product pages featuring informational tooltips or notes clearly indicating that tariffs influence pricing.
• Checkout processes that explicitly break down the base price and the tariff amount, enhancing transparency.
• Subscription management interfaces where tariff-related adjustments are clearly communicated ahead of renewal periods.

While basic functionalities can be partially achieved through existing plugins—such as price breakdown or additional fee plugins—most roasters will benefit significantly from customized solutions. Engaging a skilled developer or a specialized design studio will help to implement these transparency features effectively.

Conclusion

In an era where customer trust and brand integrity profoundly influence purchasing decisions, transparently displaying tariff costs is more than good ethics—it's excellent strategy. Coffee roasters who openly communicate these economic realities will not only educate their customers but also foster deeper loyalty and stand out in an increasingly competitive market.

If you're interested in bringing greater transparency to your e-commerce platform or have questions about implementing these strategies, we’d love to help.

Back from Houston—still buzzing from an epic weekend at the SCA Expo!

We kicked off the Specialty Coffee Association Expo by unveiling the vibrant new booth design and refreshed look and feel for our friends at Swiss Water® Process. The energy was incredible, and seeing people explore and interact with the space we created was next-level rewarding.

Another huge moment was spotting our packaging design for Sum›One on display at the Coffee Design Awards. Being recognized alongside some seriously innovative work reminded us exactly why we love working in coffee and design.

Of course, Expo isn't just about booths and awards—it's about reconnecting with old friends, making new connections, and soaking up inspiration from every corner of the coffee universe.  And to cap it all off? The legendary La Marzocco party delivered once again. 

Counting down the days till we do it all over again next year in San Diego in 2026.

In today's competitive specialty coffee landscape, having a strong direct-to-consumer (DTC) online presence is essential. The pandemic accelerated this trend dramatically, and recent events will only reinforce this direction. But as the market matures, coffee consumers have grown increasingly sophisticated in their expectations.

Here's the reality many roasters face: while template-based Shopify stores can work well for some businesses, they may not always adequately support the unique needs of specialty coffee roasters. For serious roasters looking to grow their direct sales channel, custom development is often the preferred choice. Let's explore why a tailored solution can be advantageous.

Creating Flexible, Growth-Driving Subscription Experiences

For most successful roasteries, subscriptions aren't just another revenue stream — they're the backbone of predictable business growth. The subscription model provides consistent revenue, helps with production planning, and builds lasting customer relationships. But default subscription setups typically fall short in design and user experience.

Off-the-shelf subscription solutions often exist as disconnected add-ons rather than seamless parts of your brand experience. Custom subscription development allows you to:

• Create visually distinctive subscription flows that maintain your brand identity throughout
• Develop unique presentation of subscription options that highlight your specific offerings
• Create coffee rotation experiences like roaster's choice, origin exploration, or process method series, that work well with your fulfillment workflow

Our roastery clients always see their subscription retention increase after implementing a custom subscription platform that’s a natural extension of their brand.

Telling Your Coffee's Origin Story Effectively

Specialty coffee shouldn't be seen as a commodity – it should be seen as a craft product with a compelling origin story. Your beans have traveled thousands of miles, been carefully nurtured by skilled producers, and meticulously roasted by your team. This narrative differentiates your product from supermarket options, but effectively conveying this story requires more than just words – it requires intentional design.

While template themes can provide a starting point, they rarely offer the flexibility needed to fully showcase your coffee's unique journey. The design of your website plays a crucial role in immersing your customers in the story behind each cup.

Custom development empowers you to leverage design to its fullest potential, allowing you to:

• Create interactive farm maps that visually transport customers to the origin of your beans
• Build producer profile sections with rich imagery that put a human face to the farmers behind each coffee
• Develop engaging visual timelines that illustrate the complex journey from seed to cup
• Integrate harvest data and lot information seamlessly into your design, updating with each season
• Showcase sustainability initiatives and impact metrics in a visually compelling way that aligns with your brand's aesthetic

By investing in custom design and development, you can craft an online experience that doesn't just tell your coffee's story – it immerses your customers in it. Thoughtful design choices, from color palette to interactive elements, work together to create a cohesive narrative that resonates with your target audience.

In a market where specialty coffee is increasingly valued for its origin and artisanship, the way you visually present your product's story can be just as impactful as the story itself. Elevating your online presence through custom design and development is a powerful way to showcase the care and craft behind every bag of beans.

Customizing Your Product Architecture

Coffee categorization is inherently complex. Do you organize by country of origin? Processing method? Roast profile? Flavor notes? Seasonality? Templates force you into rigid category structures that rarely match how your customers actually shop for coffee.

Custom product architecture allows you to:

• Create multi-faceted navigation systems that adapt to different customer shopping preferences and marketing initiatives
• Implement advanced filtering specific to coffee attributes that matter to your audience
• Build smart recommendation engines based on previous purchases and stated preferences
• Develop curated collections hand-selected by your roasters to highlight specific themes or experiences
• Create seasonal or limited-edition showcases that give prominence to special offerings
• Implement roaster's picks sections that leverage your team's expertise and personality

When a customer who loves fruity natural-processed coffees can easily find similar options in your catalog without having to understand coffee terminology, you've removed friction from the buying process. Equally important, when your head roaster can easily showcase their latest obsession or create a curated flight of related coffees, you're leveraging the human expertise that makes your brand special.

Integrating Coffee Education That Drives Value

Education is the secret weapon of successful roasteries. When customers know how to properly brew your coffee, they have better experiences, appreciate your product more, and ultimately spend more money with your business. Template themes offer rudimentary functionality, but truly integrated education requires custom development.

With a custom approach, you can:

• Create brew guides tailored to specific coffees in your lineup
• Develop interactive brewing calculators that help customers dial in their perfect cup
• Build a comprehensive knowledge base for coffee education
• Implement customer learning paths that track progress and encourage exploration
• Integrate video content seamlessly with product pages

We’ve created custom brew guides for roasteries that have been so compelling they’ve driven traffic to the site by themselves. Never underestimate the power of educating your customers.

Visualizing Flavor Profiles That Sell Coffee

Describing flavor is perhaps the greatest challenge in online coffee sales. How do you convey the complex taste experience of your Ethiopian natural or Colombian washed coffee through a screen? Template product descriptions fail to capture these nuances in meaningful ways.

Custom flavor visualization can include:

• Interactive flavor wheels that highlight dominant taste notes
• Sliding scales for attributes like acidity, body, and sweetness
• Comparative tools that show flavor relationships between different offerings
• Customer review integration with flavor tagging to build collective intelligence
• Personalized recommendation systems based on stated flavor preferences

When customers can clearly understand what to expect from your coffee before purchasing, you dramatically increase satisfaction and reduce the chance they'll be disappointed by choosing a profile that doesn't match their preferences.

The Return on Investment for Custom Development

Let's address the elephant in the room: custom Shopify development requires a greater initial investment than installing a template. However, when evaluated properly, the ROI becomes clear for serious roasteries:

• Higher conversion rates from better user experiences and clearer product communication
• Increased average order values through effective cross-selling and educational content
• Stronger subscription retention from flexible, customer-friendly systems
• Reduced customer service costs by preemptively addressing common questions
• Brand differentiation in an increasingly crowded marketplace

Most importantly, a custom solution grows with your business, instead of being an obstacle that holds you back. We often talk about thinking of your website as a garden you curate, rather than a car that goes down in value from the moment you drive it off the lot. Your website can grow alongside your business.

Taking the Next Step

Every roastery's needs are different, which is precisely why template solutions fall short. Your coffee is unique, thoughtfully crafted, and deserving of an online experience that matches its quality. Your website should be too. Let's talk.

Price adjustments are an unavoidable reality; however, clear communication that acknowledges customer value and explains business necessities can turn a potentially negative interaction into a brand-strengthening moment. This guide provides a clear approach to implementing subscription price changes across WooCommerce and Shopify platforms. We’ll walk through each step of the process to help you transition to more sustainable pricing while maintaining strong customer relationships.

A Three-Step Approach to Subscription Price Increases

The process of updating your subscription prices can be broken down into three main steps that work for both WooCommerce and Shopify platforms.

Step 1: Update Base Pricing for New Subscribers

The first step is updating the base price of your subscription products. You can update subscription prices directly in Shopify and WooCommerce.

Important: On both WooCommerce and Shopify, updating your product prices will only apply to new subscriptions. Existing subscribers are automatically “grandfathered” into their original pricing agreement. This creates two distinct customer groups: new subscribers at your updated pricing, and existing customers at their original rates.

Step 2: Communicate Changes to Your Customers

Before implementing price changes for existing subscribers, clear communication is essential. Creating a thoughtful email notification that explains the situation helps maintain trust and transparency.

Elements to include in your communication

• Explanation of market conditions necessitating the change
• Specific details about the new pricing and when it takes effect
• Reassurance about continued quality and service
• Appreciation for their ongoing support

Sample Email Template

Subject: Important Update to Your [Your Brand] Coffee Subscription 

Dear [Name], 

We're reaching out about an important update to your coffee subscription. 

The specialty coffee market has seen significant cost increases over the past year, affecting everything from green coffee prices to shipping. To continue providing the exceptional coffee quality you expect, we need to adjust our subscription pricing. 

Effective [Date], your [Product Name] subscription will change from [Original Price] to [New Price] per [frequency]. 

What this means for you:

• This change will take effect on your next billing cycle after [Date]
• No action is required on your part
• Your delivery schedule remains unchanged
• Our commitment to quality remains unwavering 

We remain dedicated to sourcing exceptional beans and maintaining the roasting standards that have made our relationship with you so valuable. 

If you have any questions about this change, please don't hesitate to contact us. 

Thank you for your continued support, 
[Your Name] [Your Brand]

Step 3: Implement Price Changes for Existing Subscribers

This step requires different technical approaches depending on which platform you’re using.

Note: Since pre-paid subscriptions are already paid for, they would not fall into this list. Similarly, if someone has set up a pay-as-you-go subscription for a short period of time (3 months or less), we’d recommend leaving those as is. Ideally, these instructions are for ongoing pay-as-you-go subscriptions without a fixed end point.

WooCommerce Implementation with AutomateWoo

WooCommerce with AutomateWoo provides several options for managing subscription price updates. The full documentation is available at WooCommerce’s official guide.

Option 1: Update at Next Renewal

We recommend this approach since it updates prices after the subscriber’s next payment is complete:

1. Create a New Workflow
   • Go to AutomateWoo > Workflows > Add New
   • Name it something descriptive like “Coffee Subscription Price Update”
2. Set the Trigger
   • Select Subscription Renewal Payment Complete
   • This gives customers one final payment at their current rate
3. Add Rules to Target Products
   • Add a Subscription – Contains Product rule
   • Select the coffee products that need price adjustments
4. Configure the Update Action
   • Add action: Update Subscription Product
   • Enter the new price in the Custom Product Price field
5. Add a Notification
   • Add action: Send Email
   • Create a template confirming the completed price change

Option 2: Update Before Next Payment

For updating prices before the next renewal, WooCommerce provides a detailed guide.

1. Follow the steps above, but select Subscription Before Renewal as your trigger
2. Set the time period (typically 7-14 days before renewal)
3. Complete the configuration as outlined above

Option 3: Immediate Bulk Update

When you need to update all prices immediately:

1. Create a workflow with the Manual trigger
2. Add the same rules and actions as in Option 1
3. Go to AutomateWoo > Tools > Run Manual Workflow
4. Select your workflow and click Run Now

Shopify Implementation

Shopify’s approach depends on which subscription app you’re using.

Using Bold Subscriptions

Bold Subscriptions offers a comprehensive guide on bulk price updates.

1. Access the Bulk Update Tool
   • From Bold Subscriptions admin, go to Subscriptions > Bulk Updates
   • Select Create a bulk update
2. Choose Update Type
   • Select Price from the dropdown menu
   • Click Select Products
3. Set New Prices
   • Select the subscription products to update
   • Click Confirm
   • Enter the new price for each product
   • Click Save Changes
4. Finalize Changes
   • After updating all products, select Confirm Changes
   • Download the summary report to verify all changes

Note: Bold Subscriptions doesn’t automatically notify customers of price changes, making your advance email notification crucial.

Using ReCharge

ReCharge uses a product swap method to update subscription prices (see full documentation).

1. Go to Subscription Management
   • Navigate to the ReCharge subscription management section
2. Select Subscriptions
   • Use filters to find specific products or all subscriptions
   • Use checkboxes to select subscriptions for updating
3. Perform Product Swap
   • Select the Swap Product option
   • Choose the current product variant in the swap from field
   • Select the same product variant in the swap to field
   • Check the Change unit price option
   • Enter the new price
   • Confirm the update

Best Practices for Subscription Price Updates

1. Test First
   • Always run updates on a test subscription before implementing widely
   • If you have a WooCommerce website, test these changes on your staging server first
   • Verify that prices update correctly and emails send properly
2. Back Up Your Data
   • Create a backup before making bulk changes to protect against errors
3. Consider Phased Implementation
   • Update different product lines in stages to spread out customer service inquiries
   • This makes the process more manageable for your team
4. Monitor Customer Response
   • Track retention rates to gauge the impact of price changes
   • Be prepared to address customer questions promptly

Conclusion

While raising prices is never easy, implementing changes thoughtfully with clear communication is an important step. By following this guide, you can successfully update your subscription pricing across both WooCommerce and Shopify.

Our latest brand design project is now in the spotlight. Sum>One Coffee Roasters, the specialty coffee brand we designed for Farmer Brothers, was unveiled today in Daily Coffee News. The launch marks Farmer Brothers' strategic entry into the specialty coffee market with a brand designed to celebrate the craft and connection behind every cup. We're proud to see our design work helping Farmer Brothers "meet customers wherever they may be across the coffee spectrum with traditional, premium and specialty tiered coffee options."

Read more about the project in Daily Coffee News or head to our portfolio.

For the last few years, I've hosted a website for my DJ Disarray alter ego on WordPress. It was a natural and obvious platform, and it's very easy to pick a template and get a site up. But after a while, the familiar drawbacks of WordPress started to haunt me, and I decided it was time for something with a bit more power and a lot more control. And so I decided to give Craft CMS a try.

Why Craft?

Under the hood, the Craft setup is not much different from WordPress. It uses many of the same technologies, but I would describe it as being much better thought-out and much more modern. WordPress tends to cling to outmoded technologies and workflows, whereas Craft stays much closer to the cutting edge.

While it was a nice fit for my personal project, Craft is also something we're considering in the future for our clients. It's a much better system for the types of projects that we, as an agency, build all the time.

WordPress favors a workflow that lets anyone jump in and build a site using a modern editor to build out pages. The problem with this approach—which I experienced firsthand with my DJ website—is that pages often end up looking slightly different from one another. If you want to make a layout change to all "venue pages," for example, you'd have to edit them all by hand.

WordPress can address this issue with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields, but plugins tend to slow down websites. And since they're third-party add-ons, they typically don't work as seamlessly as features that are purpose-built for the system. Craft has all the best parts of Advanced Custom Fields included, even in its free version.

It's Fast

My WordPress site was quite minimal, yet needed 14 plugins to function the way I wanted. The Craft site I've built uses zero plugins. I could definitely be taking advantage of some, and probably will in time, but I was curious to see how far I could get building all the features by hand.

Despite its depth of features, the site runs faster than it did on WordPress, despite the hosting costing me only $5 per month, significantly less than I was paying before. I'm hosting it on the excellent Fortrabbit platform. While this isn't necessarily indicative of how every website will perform in Craft—I get a handful of visitors a day—it provides a helpful point of reference.

It's Smooth

Moving code between my development and production environments in WordPress is painful. It requires at least one plugin and can be error-prone. WordPress doesn't really have any formal separation between environments, which can quickly get messy and lead to mistakes.

Craft encourages you to decide which environment is the "source of truth" for your logic, design, and content. These can be different, but while building this project, those sources of truth were on my laptop. I only ever had to worry about migrating content in one direction, and Craft makes deploying code and content trivially simple.

This allows me to work quickly without losing time waiting for code or content to move around.

It's Iterative

I've long been a fan of designing in the browser, and while it doesn't always work for every project, it worked wonderfully for this one. This approach gives you a chance to think about how the design will work across all devices as you go and can spark ideas that might not have occurred if you were just creating static mockups beforehand.

Because this has been a passion project, I can spend just an hour or two a few nights a week and end up with something really exciting. If I decide to add a feature, it generally happens in an hour or two, and I can call it a night. This is not a timeline I'm accustomed to in my professional work.

It's Straightforward

When working on a WordPress theme, I often find myself with a half dozen tabs open just to edit one block of content. You don't just edit one template file—you often have to track down several, including PHP files with code and separate style sheets.

Craft gives me control over where exactly I want to include files to make the site modular and doesn't force me to add bits of code to override the output. Additionally, since I was using Tailwind for the styles, the design decisions live inside the same template files, so I'm often only working on a single file at a time. Much simpler.

It's Flexible

As I mentioned, Advanced Custom Fields can do a lot of what I'm doing with Craft, but with significant limitations. For instance, if you have a category page that you're using to organize things, like I'm doing with venue pages, you have to bend over backwards to get WordPress to let you customize those as you wish. With Craft, this was as simple as creating a template file.

This flexibility means I can make custom pages for venues, which is my favorite design on the site. I can add whatever fields I want to the venues and then show a timeline of all the events I've had at that venue. This would have been a far more complicated task in WordPress, but it's a single template file in Craft.

Conclusions

Craft CMS is really fun, but it's definitely not for everyone!

If you want to spin up a site quickly and just use a page builder and some prebuilt themes, WordPress is great. It's the right solution for a lot of people. It was probably the right solution when I wanted a quick-and-dirty site for my side gig.

But as someone comfortable writing code and building web designs, someone who wants control over both the experience my customers have (the users of the site's admin) as well as the experience site visitors have, Craft has proven to be an excellent choice.