Country Life Natural Foods review for Group Carts & Chat Rooms

Dec. 17, 2021

I do not wish Jack or his team any harm in this response. Jack was always kind to me, but ultimately I feel it is my responsibility to Shopify and its retailers to let them know of our experience. We installed the app and liked the concept. We needed a few customizations and paid for a $3,000 custom solution. In my opinion, that was too much but if it worked it was worth it for our business model. After the customization, we tested it and sent back our concerns. This cycle continued for months. I have emails on emails - some of our simple customizations (wording and logo) had to be requested multiple times. Ultimately, we have given up. Cartonomy wants to make it work, but I counted 86 emails we exchanged, which is too much time and energy for a solution with which we never successfully placed an order. Unfortunately, I have a vote of no confidence that it will ever be an effective solution with good enough support to meet our needs. Cartonomy's team did not own our problems as their own but told us why our software was creating the problems and why it was costing them so much money to help us. You will notice this lack of ownership in the responses made to other negative reviews. It just never worked, it's not worth another 86 emails hoping that it might. The concept is neat, but it's ultimately a very clunky group ordering app that has to be totally transferred to Shopify in a disconnected way that makes changes a nightmare. Once we pushed orders to Shopify, if you intentionally trigger any minor change it creates problems. When we had those problems, the developers simply told us why our system was the problem. The developer wrote to me, "For the amount of work we have done for you and the timeframe we did it in, you could add a zero or two to the amount you have paid to get to the market value of what we have done as another firm would have billed you." I felt like I was the problem and not the paying customer. When we reached out for a refund, they said they had “delivered [our] project to [our] stated satisfaction TWICE.” I apologized if we ever said we were satisfied, and asked them to clarify for me at which two points we communicated that we were satisfied with the project delivered. They did not directly answer my question. We were also told it was because we had changed our site, which is to say if you ever plan to update your website this is not a solution for you. Our site did some updates, but these were regular business updates and not a total revamp of our UI/UX. They wrote to me, "You wouldn't prep someone for surgery and then go do the surgery on someone else without making adjustments. I don't know why you expect that technology works any differently." This is not the kind of professionalism we look for when choosing developers. I wish we had carefully read the earlier reviews. If I could do it again, I would spend my time and $3,000 on a fully integrated custom solution.