A guide for coffee roasters
Coffee subscriptions with local pickup on Shopify
How to sell a bag every week or every two weeks, picked up at the roastery or dropped off locally, with orders that close before roast day and one list of what to roast. Step by step, using Still Works Standing Orders.
Most coffee subscription tools are built around shipping. A roaster with a counter has a different week: beans are roasted on one day, rested, and handed over on another. The customer wants the same bag on the same day without thinking about it, and you want to know on Monday night exactly how much of each coffee to roast on Tuesday. A standing order is that: a subscription with a day attached, a cutoff before the roast, and a limit per coffee so you never promise more than a batch.
The whole setup takes one sitting, all inside your Shopify admin. If you also run a bakery counter, the bakery guide covers the same app from the bread side.
Before you open the app, decide three things
| Decision | What it means for a roaster | A typical answer |
|---|---|---|
| Which days coffee is handed over | The days a customer can choose for pickup or a local drop. Roast days that nobody collects on do not count. | Friday, and Saturday at the market stall |
| When orders close | Far enough before roast day to plan the batches. The card is charged at this moment, and the customer can skip or change right up to it. | Monday at 8 p.m. for a Friday pickup |
| How many bags of each coffee | A limit per coffee per day, set by your batch size. A full day shows as full for that coffee only. | Thirty house blend, twelve single origin |
1. Install, then set up the week
Install Still Works Standing Orders from the Shopify App Store and open it from Apps in your admin. The menu has four items: Today, Customers, Set up, and Settings. Set up has tabs, and you go through them in order.
- Locations. Add the roastery as a pickup location, matched to your Shopify location, with a line about where to collect: the side door, the café counter, the market stall. Shopify needs local pickup turned on for that location and a full street address, and the app tells you if either is missing. If you drop coffee at offices or homes nearby, add a local delivery run as well.
- Week. Tick the handover days. Under "When do orders close?" choose how many days before and at what time. Friday pickup with a Monday night cutoff is four days before, at 20:00. If the market day needs a different lead, untick "Same cutoff for every day".
- Plans. Add a plan, choose the coffees you will roast on a standing basis, and pick how often: every week, every two weeks, or every four weeks. Every two weeks is the one most coffee regulars choose, so leave it ticked. A small percentage off is optional.
- Capacity. Type the bags per day for each coffee. Leave a box blank where there is no limit.
- Calendar. Close the days the roaster is down for maintenance or you are away. Standing orders on a closed day move to the next open day, and each customer gets an email saying so.
2. What the customer sees
On the coffee's product page, next to the ordinary one-time purchase, there is a Standing order choice with a day, how often, and a first pickup date that only offers days with room. If the choice is not showing, Set up, Overview has a link that switches the app's block on in your theme editor. Customers check out with Pickup and their card like any other order.
If you sell a coffee as whole bean and ground, set those up as options on the product the way you do now. From their account on your store, customers can swap to another coffee on the plan, skip the next one, skip until a date, pause, resume, change their day, or cancel. Their card and address are updated from the same account page. None of it needs an email to you.
3. Monday night and Friday morning
After orders close, open Today and pick the day. The top of the list is the total for each coffee, which is your roast plan. Below it is every customer and what they are collecting, marked paid. Print it or download it as a file. The forecast under the list shows the next two weeks, so a new single origin can be ordered in before it is needed.
On pickup day, mark each bag ready as it is labelled, or mark everything ready at once, and Shopify sends the customer its ready-for-pickup message. If someone does not come, mark it a no-show. For local drops, mark each order out for delivery and delivered.
4. Seasonal blends, full days, and paying ahead
- A one-time order for a chosen day. The same product page takes a single order for a specific pickup day, which suits a holiday blend or a pound for the office party. It is counted against that day's limit with the standing orders.
- When a day is full. A customer who finds Friday full for a coffee can leave an email to be told if a spot opens, and the app emails them when one does.
- Paying ahead. A plan can be sold as a block paid up front, four, eight, or twelve deliveries in one charge. A skipped week or a closed day carries the credit forward.
5. The money
Each standing order is charged once when orders close, never twice for the same day. If a card fails, the customer is emailed with a link to update it and the app tries again on days one, three, and seven. If it still fails, the standing order is paused, not cancelled, and nothing more is charged until the customer resumes. The app never takes a share of your sales. The plans are flat monthly prices listed in the App Store, and the smallest is free.
Where to go from here
The Still Works Standing Orders page has the plain description of what the app does and does not do. If something in this guide does not match what you see, email the studio and it gets fixed the same business day.