Why we built RestoQ

RestoQ is the first app out of N36 labs. It is a small Shopify app that reminds a store’s customers to reorder the things they use up, a few days before they run out. This is the long version of why we built it, what it does, and what we deliberately left out.

The problem: the reorder nobody asks for

Picture a store that sells something people use up: supplements, skincare, coffee, detergent, pet food. The standard advice is to add a subscribe-and-save option. A small slice of customers takes it. Everyone else buys the way they always have, whenever they happen to notice they are running low. Or they never come back at all.

That second group is where we kept looking. A customer who reorders on their own every six weeks is a good customer. They just will not sign a standing order. Most stores have no plan for them beyond hoping they remember.

What the research says

Before building anything, we went through the published research on how people reorder consumables. The full write-up, with every source and how much weight it deserves, is on the RestoQ blog: Why Your Repeat Customers Won’t Subscribe. The short version:

• Most first-time buyers never come back. The widely quoted average repeat purchase rate is about 28%, so roughly three in four customers never place a second order. That figure comes from vendor data and one heavily reprinted dataset, so treat it as a rough benchmark.
• The people who reorder but won’t subscribe are real. This is the strongest finding. A controlled field experiment found that 24 to 36% of would-be subscribers backed away specifically from offers that auto-renewed. In retail, only about 23% of US Amazon customers had an active Subscribe & Save order in 2024, even though it lets you skip or cancel any time.
• A reminder that asks nothing of them works. Well-timed replenishment emails are reported to convert in the 8 to 15% range within a week. That number is from vendor data too.
• A schedule that doesn’t fit drives subscribers away. “I have too much product” ranks among the top reasons people cancel a subscription.

The research also says what it cannot prove. Nobody has published a test of whether a schedule matched to a customer’s real pace would win over the people who avoid subscriptions. And the single strongest study is about newspapers, not shampoo. We took that seriously when deciding what to build.

Three kinds of customer, not two

The useful takeaway is that a consumables store does not have “subscribers” and “everyone else.” It has three groups:

1. One-and-done. Bought once, gone. Some were never coming back. Some just forgot.
2. Self-schedulers. They reorder on their own rhythm, often reliably, and they will not sign up for a recurring plan. This is the group nobody markets to properly.
3. Subscribers. Already signed up. The job here is keeping the schedule honest so they do not drown in product.

RestoQ is built for the middle group, and for the one-and-done buyers who only needed a nudge.

Why we decided to build it

The gap was real, and it was being ignored. Most retention tools push merchants toward subscriptions, or try to become the whole marketing stack. The evidence pointed at a quieter opportunity: get a reminder in front of the right customer at the right moment, and make reordering one click.

It is one job, done well. That is how we like to build. RestoQ does not need to replace anything a store already runs. It needs to be right about timing and stay out of the way.

The merchant keeps their voice. Stores already have an email platform, templates and a brand they care about. We did not want to make them rebuild any of it, so RestoQ hands the message to the tools they already use.

It could stay small and cheap. Because the heavy lifting happens in the store’s own email platform, RestoQ can be lean, and so can its price.

What RestoQ does

1. The merchant marks a product as consumable in Shopify and enters how many days one lasts.
2. When an order is fulfilled, RestoQ schedules a reminder for a few days before that customer is due to run out.
3. On the day, RestoQ sends the store’s email platform an event with everything the message needs: the product, price, image, customer name, discount code, and a one-click cart link. The store’s own flow turns that into an email, in its own templates.
4. If the customer reorders through that link, RestoQ records the sale, attributes it, and schedules the next reminder.

Klaviyo is the email platform RestoQ sends to today. Every store starts on a 45-day free trial, with no card required. The timing is ours. The pitch is the merchant’s.

What we chose not to do

• No promised results. Customers decide whether to buy, every time. The offer and copy a store puts in front of them earns that decision. RestoQ’s job is narrower: get the timing right, hand over the data, and make reordering easy.
• Not a platform. The research says the middle group is reachable. It does not say a clever enough offer turns everyone into a subscriber. So we kept the scope small.
• No invented numbers. RestoQ’s calculations happen in the data layer and stay inspectable. AI is used to interpret and explain them, not to make them up.
• No product built from customer lists. Insights come from anonymized data, to make better recommendations for each store.

Where it goes next

The RestoQ roadmap is a direction, not a delivery schedule. The main threads are more email platform connectors beyond Klaviyo, per-customer subscription cadence through apps stores already use (such as Appstle), better statistical tooling for spotting reorder opportunities, and possibly a way to send reminders for stores that have no email platform at all. The details, and the reasoning behind each, are in What’s Next for RestoQ.

The per-customer cadence work is the one we find most interesting, because it goes straight at the question the research could not answer. We would rather build the instrumentation to find out than assume the answer.

Read more

• RestoQ, smart replenishment for Shopify
• Why Your Repeat Customers Won’t Subscribe (And What the Research Actually Says)
• What’s Next for RestoQ