The Urban Flair review for Rise.ai: Gift Cards & Loyalty

May 19, 2021

Here is an honest and clear update of my experience with Rise: Obviously as a business owner myself, I understand how important reviews are and I am honestly not one to leave negative feedback but I do feel that what I have gone through is important to share. A little bit of background: I sell predominantly through Etsy but also have a Shopify storefront. It’s always been a little bit frustrating for me that Shopify does not natively support many (what I would personally deem ‘necessary’) eCommerce features out of the box — store credit/gift cards being one of them. Because this type of thing is not included in a basic Shopify plan, we’re essentially forced to download a plethora of apps to support “additional” features. At its basic level, yes, Rise does what it “should”. I was a regular, $19.99 monthly-subscription paying customer for close to a year, maybe even more — even though every month I would definitely be paying more for the app than I would actually ever be getting out of it. However, I felt like having the gift card/store credit option was a necessity, so what choice did I have? I always have been (and unfortunately, still am) on the hunt to find a way to centrally manage details/status/tracking of both my Shopify and Etsy orders in one place. In an experimental attempt to do so, I imported my Etsy orders in bulk to my Shopify store without thinking twice about it affecting anything else. Shortly there after, I noticed a charge from Shopify for over $600! I was floored! How could I be charged that high of an amount without it being confirmed/authorized?! When I went in to the billing details, I noticed that the charge was from Rise. Immediately I uninstalled the app, contacted their support and Shopify support. Again, we’re not talking a measly $20 here... we’re talking... $600! Shopify support was great! They were very prompt and dedicated to helping me resolve the problem. The first response I got back from a Rise support member, however, was absolutely ridiculous. He claimed that they were doing me a “favor” and I actually should have been charged much more. Copy and pasted from the response: “Our pricing is based on total store orders, hence for each additional order above the plan limit, you'll be charged a fee. You're on the Starter plan which includes up to 100 total store orders per month ($0.2 extra charge per order). The past month you've had a total of 8,274 orders, which results in an overcharge of $1,654.80 So instead of charging you that amount, you were charged for the value of the monthly Premium plan.” Confused, I tried to explain that these were IMPORTED orders and there is absolutely no clear verbiage about this in their terms/plan details/etc. I exchanged a few more emails back and forth trying to defend my position while being bounced back and forth by at least 5-7 different support team members. Almost every response I got was from someone different. Finally, they concluded that I, in fact, WAS mis-charged and would be refunded. The literal next day (and obviously before I had gotten my money refunded back), I had another email from a different support member requesting that I remove my initial review — which really didn’t sit well with me. Mind you, my first contact with them was on April 8th. It is now May 19th and I had to send them ANOTHER email yesterday because they still have NOT refunded me. I will leave the other names unmentioned but Dana was the only support member that I feel was truly trying to provide me with any real “support”. So thank you, Dana. I do appreciate that you tried to help.