If you're a winery, brewery, or drinks producer thinking about selling subscriptions online, you've probably already looked at Shopify. It's the most recognisable name in e-commerce, it powers millions of online stores, and for a lot of things it works brilliantly.

Wine clubs and drinks subscriptions are not those things.

This article explains why Shopify struggles with subscription commerce for drinks producers, what you'd need to make it work, and when Marzipan is likely to be a better fit.

What Shopify does well

Let's be fair: Shopify is an excellent platform for selling products online. It has a polished storefront, a huge app ecosystem, great payment processing, and strong logistics integrations. If you want to sell cases of wine as one-off purchases, Shopify does that well.

The problem comes the moment you want to offer subscriptions: wine clubs, recurring shipments, quarterly allocations, or any arrangement where a customer pays on an ongoing basis to receive wine they haven't individually selected each time.

Why Shopify struggles with drinks subscriptions

Shopify wasn't built for subscriptions. It was built for retail. Someone picks a product, adds it to a basket, pays, receives it. That transaction is complete.

Subscriptions are fundamentally different. They involve:

  • A customer agreeing to receive (and pay for) future shipments they haven't chosen yet
  • Variable order contents: different wines each quarter, curated by the producer
  • Renewal management: charging the customer again each cycle without them actively repurchasing
  • Failed payment recovery: what happens when a card declines on renewal day
  • Member management: pausing, skipping, updating delivery addresses, changing tiers
  • Allocation logic: some wine club releases are limited, members get priority access

Shopify handles none of this natively. To run a subscription on Shopify, you need a third-party app. The best option for drinks, wine, and food producers is Awtomic. It's built with variable subscription contents in mind and understands the specific needs of curated box and wine club models better than generic alternatives.

Awtomic is genuinely good at what it does. But even the best Shopify subscription app is still bolted onto a platform that wasn't designed for this, and that has real consequences for how a wine club actually runs.

“The big Achilles heel of the big 'shopping' providers like Shopify and WooCommerce is that they don't really understand recurring subscription shopping. If you subscribe to a 'discovery case' that varies every shipment, these services do not cope at all well.”

Justin Howard-Sneyd, MW
Justin Howard-Sneyd, MW
Owner, Domaine of the Bee

The hidden costs of Shopify + subscription apps

When you add up the costs of running subscriptions on Shopify, the numbers can surprise you:

  • Shopify Basic plan: from £19/month
  • A subscription app like Awtomic: from $299/month, plus 1% of order value
  • Potentially a separate CRM or email marketing tool to manage member communications
  • Developer time to integrate everything and customise it for your specific wine club logic

You're also managing multiple separate tools that don't always talk to each other cleanly. Customer data lives in different places. Order history is fragmented. Running a member event or tasting requires yet another tool.

What Marzipan does differently

Marzipan is built specifically for subscription commerce in the drinks industry. Rather than starting from a retail model and bolting subscriptions on, subscriptions are the foundation everything is built around.

In practice, this means:

Variable subscription contents work natively. You can create a shipment where different tiers receive different wines, adjust contents for a specific cycle, or give members the ability to swap or skip without it requiring developer work.

Member management is built in. Pause, skip, cancel, upgrade, downgrade, update addresses. Members can manage their own subscriptions through their account area, and you can manage them from the same dashboard you use for everything else.

Events and tastings are integrated. Wine clubs aren't just about the wine; they're about access. Marzipan handles event ticketing and reservations in the same platform, so your harvest tasting or cellar door event is connected to your member data rather than living in a separate system.

CRM is built in. Your customer purchase history, club membership, event attendance, and communication preferences all live in one place. You're not exporting data between systems to understand who your best customers are.

EU hosted and GDPR compliant. Marzipan is built in the UK and hosted on EU-based servers. For wineries and drinks producers selling to customers in the UK and EU, this matters for compliance and for trust.

When Shopify makes sense

Shopify is still the right choice in some situations:

  • You primarily sell wine as one-off cases or bottles with no recurring subscription element
  • You have an existing Shopify store with a large catalogue and just want to add a simple recurring product (same wine, same price, every month)
  • You need access to a specific Shopify integration that Marzipan doesn't currently support
  • You have a developer team comfortable building custom subscription logic on top of Shopify's API

If subscriptions are a small edge case in your business rather than a core offering, Shopify plus a subscription app may be good enough.

When Marzipan makes sense

Marzipan is likely the better fit if:

  • Wine club or subscription memberships are central to your DTC business model
  • Your shipments vary, with different wines each cycle and different tiers receiving different allocations
  • You host events and tastings for members and want those managed in the same system
  • You're selling into the UK or EU and want a platform built with GDPR compliance and EU data hosting in mind
  • You're currently running your wine club manually or with spreadsheets and want to professionalise it

The bottom line

Shopify is a great platform for e-commerce. For drinks subscriptions, particularly wine clubs with variable contents, member tiers, and integrated events, it requires significant workarounds that add cost, complexity, and ongoing maintenance.

We built Marzipan for exactly this situation: drinks producers running curated subscriptions where shipments vary and members matter as much as the wine. Subscriptions, member management, events, and CRM live in one place from day one, hosted in the EU, with pricing from £199/month and no transaction fees on order value.

If subscriptions are at the heart of how you sell direct to your customers, it's worth seeing Marzipan in practice.

Related

For a broader look at choosing a platform, read our guide to wine club software for wineries. Or compare Marzipan vs WooCommerce.