Mountain Madness Soap Co. review for Marsello: Omnichannel Loyalty

June 7, 2021

Revised 5 star review to 1 star. I do not know what has happened with Marsello and am honestly dismayed by our recent experience with them. We have been a customer for 3 years and have had a good relationship with them, have been beta testers, and have even been a success story for their marketing department. Yesterday I needed to do some manual account maintenance and discovered that we were locked out of the admin interface because we had exceeded 10,000 customers. In addition, the customer facing rewards interface was no longer working on our web site. We were apparently on some grandfathered plan at $59/month and they randomly decided to do away with that and wanted us to switch to their new "pro" plan based on number of customers. Sure, no problem UNTIL they said our pricing would go from $59 to $559 PER MONTH. An 800% price increase and the hobbling of our installed (and paid for) software is absolutely inexcusable. At this point we were essentially being held hostage until we paid. After getting the same "I know this is a bit of a shock" circular run-around from the support chat person, I asked them to have someone contact me ASAP. Well, I have not heard back from anyone at Marsello and we have customers emailing, calling and messaging about their rewards account. So, today we made the decision to simply dump them and switch to a different rewards application. On the plus side, Marsello made it easy for me to export our customer data along with point balances and I was able to import that into a different reward app that I had up and running in a few hours. Marsello has seemingly gotten too big for their britches. When we first signed up, it was just a loyalty program and did a good job at it. Then, over time, they made it into a customer relationship management software and email and SMS marketing software. Some of their automations are good, such as abandoned cart emails, but for the most part we continued to use it only for loyalty purposes since we have other applications that handle those aspects of our business. Bottom-line: growing eCommerce businesses, watch out for the bait and switch. Despite their response here indicating that there was a resolution, there was not one.