Lakeland Lights Company review for Local Delivery

Dec. 1, 2022

I regret having to write this review but after suffering a significant loss of sales as a direct result of the app, we need to share our experience. We have used the Local Delivery app for around a year. Initially it was great - the app developers themselves directly handled any support requests and actually helped get everything set up in our store with lots of communication and advice. At some point, I believe earlier this year, the app was either sold or the support/development handed off to a new team. In itself this wasn't an issue until we started to notice problems a couple of months ago with the app functionality. Updates were rolled out, unannounced, in the app which completely broke functionality with our customers unable to use the service the app provides and therefore unable to checkout. We suffered lost sales as a result of this and the app update was rolled back which fixed things. The response to the issue was pretty slow and there was very little in the way of acknowledgement of having caused such a serious issue nor an apology at that time. Fast forward a couple of weeks and another update was rolled out unannounced, again breaking functionality and preventing people from using the services the app is supposed to provide. Again, sales were lost. This time customer service were very slow to respond and when they did one of their team, who I won't name, was pretty rude - having mentioned we were heading into our busiest season and needed the app to be functioning correctly we got the following response: "We are aware of your issue and it is a priority, it is quite a busy season for us all." Not the best of responses we felt and did receive an apology for the tone in a follow up email. Further app updates were rolled back and again things started working albeit with some known issues (the free delivery options were now no longer ticked by default in some cases - an annoying but manageable intermittent fault). Fast forward to earlier this week and we started to get messages from our customers saying that they could not proceed through the checkout pages after selecting options that the Local Delivery app handles. We noticed a significant drop off of more than 50% in sales from Monday evening which lasted through to Wednesday evening and we continuned to receive more messages from customers who found checkout pages were just hanging. We observed in real time customers going through the cart process then just disappearing as they got stuck at checkout. Worse still, these were not being captured by the abandoned checkout functions so could not be contacted to complete orders. Working with our web developer we were able to narrow the issue down to the Local Delivery app and on contacting support it was confirmed that there was a known issue with loading between checkout pages in some themes and that they'd been contacted by other customers about this. No one had bothered to contact us about any updates that had been rolled out or that there might be a known issue to be aware of - we were left for 2.5 days just seeing our sales drop off a cliff and having to troubleshoot ourselves. Customer service did respond quickly in the end and overnight rolled back a number of updates and hey presto, our sales are back to normal. However, we estimate that our lost sales were substantial and a direct result of the app not performing correctly for more than 2 days at the busiest time of year. I have requested that a senior member of staff contact us urgently to discuss and we're awaiting that contact as we speak but we are deeply unhappy with the reliability of the app, the lack of communication about any updates (so we could keep an eye in case it affects things) and general customer service levels. We are stuck with using the app during the rest of the busy season as simply do not have time or ability to implement a new season before Christmas but I would strongly urge others to consider different options. This has impacted our sales numbers significantly 3 times over a number of days in the last couple of months. So far we've been offered the occasional apology but nothing else of note. We are very unhappy but felt it important that we share our experience with others considering using the app.