How Trade Coffee delivers white glove experiences at scale

About Trade Coffee

Trade Coffee is America’s #1 specialty‑coffee marketplace

working with 50‑plus independent roasters nationwide to put their best beans on center stage. A short taste‑profile quiz pairs each customer with one of 450‑plus craft coffees, roasted to order and shipped within 48 hours for peak freshness. Today, Trade Coffee serves a community of 100,000 + subscribers who rely on its marketplace for freshly roasted, specialty beans delivered straight to their door.

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Trade’s AI Vision

Trade’s goal has always been to build 1-1 relationships

that start even before someone buys their first bag of coffee - guiding them to the right coffee, helping them brew it perfectly at home, and then continuing with them on a personalized journey through the world of specialty coffee. AI makes this possible. With App0, they want to provide:

• Personal coffee concierge for everyone. A 24 / 7 conversational agent guides customers from first purchase through lifelong discovery, transforming Trade from a transactional shop into a trusted daily ritual.
• Right-time, right-touch engagement. The agent is “always available, never intrusive,” shifting between quick order tweaks and rich brew coaching based on each customer’s cues.
• Great business outcomes first. By pairing luxury-level service with scalable automation, Trade targets higher conversion, stickier retention, and an LTV lift across its entire roster of coffee lovers .

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The problem

Challenges on the road to the vision

For customers

• Subscription changes can be difficult to accomplish. Most people have to dig through a browser account just to skip a shipment, change bag size, or tweak quantity - tasks CX can do in seconds but users find challenging, which is why so many end up opening tickets instead of self-serving.
• Translating taste into Trade-speak is confusing. Customers don’t always have a strong understanding of various coffee terms and don’t know how to translate their preferences into Trade’s matching algorithm to get paired with the perfect coffee.


For Trade

• No off-the-shelf chatbot is sophisticated enough and broad enough. Typical AI tools answer FAQs and do simple actions but executing every product recommendation, plan change, bag swap, and early shipment requires sophisticated reasoning and understanding complex business rules around subscriptions, user preferences and products. Further, there isn’t a single AI platform that can handle all aspects of the customer journey.
• Building a coffee-domain agent requires AI expertise that Trade doesn’t have in-house. Spinning up and iterating on LLM prompts, retrieval pipelines, and guardrails would stretch a lean team beyond its bandwidth and jeopardize the phased AI rollout.

The solution

Single, flexible App0 platform powers every touchpoint

From concierge chat to password-less emails while our dedicated FDE partners with Trade’s team to tailor each flow to their exact business rules and brand voice.

Conversational AI Agent (action-oriented & rule-aware)


A sophisticated agent that recognizes customer intent - “skip my next order,” “send an extra bag,” “change to 5-lb bags” - and executes it instantly while honoring Trade’s intricate business rules across Shopify, Ordergroove, inventory, discounts, and promotions.

Cancellation-Prevention Flow


When the agent detects a “cancel” signal, it pivots to save the relationship—offering smart pauses, plan downgrades, personalized roast swaps, or time-boxed incentives—turning potential churn into retained revenue.

Password-less Subscription

Emails
Every subscription-notification email now carries a secure, single-click link that drops customers straight into an App0-powered management surface—no login friction, no forgotten passwords—making it effortless to edit shipments and reducing passive churn.

App0-powered “Contact Us”

Page
A lightweight web widget routes questions to the AI agent first, gathering context automatically, deflecting repetitive inquiries, and escalating edge cases to the right human—fewer tickets, faster resolutions, happier customers.