Precision Computers Store review for SC Product Options

Nov. 14, 2019

First of all, many people believe Bold have the monopoly on this type of App. Not true. I checked them ALL, and there is *one* other that is comparable. We went with Bold because we had less problems getting it to work to begin with. It is difficult, cumbersome and fiddly to get everything set up and working correctly if you choose the Auto option, but if you know your way around Liquid you'll get there. Support genuinely seem to want to help, they're just not very good at it. I get the impression there are support personnel Tiers and when you get moved up a tier you have to re-explain the whole situation to them, despite a recorded history of text and submitted video files. One bug on their end that caused their backend to hang forever in certain circumstances took about a month to fix. Swatches are nice, but very bare boned functionality. The boxes even at 'Large' setting are very small (about 50x50px) and there is no hover-over functionality allowing a better look at the image. When I suggested this basic user experience feature (which if I had access to the Liquid code I could have fixed in a single line) they said they'd pass it on, but ultimately it was a custom feature request we'd have to pay for. I eventually got a solution running in three lines of CSS. While parts of the code are stored in your theme files, you can't improve them because they are overwritten by Bold sometimes multiple times a day, so you are at their mercy for basic functionality adjustments. You are given an outlet for custom CSS and that is all. The most constantly noticeable issue is that the back end is hosted on Bold servers and is extremely cumbersome to load, and to navigate. You can have an Option Set, which contains a list of Options, and those Options can have a list of products (in the case of automatic price adjustments). You can't alter a product through Shopify normally because all the data for the Option Sets are stored on Bold servers and they don't know the change occurred. You are required to alter products through the interface provided by Bold. Every time you make any change through the Bold interface, everything connected to that change needs to be updated. If you change a product in an Option, every Option Set that is linked to that Option needs to be updated. If you change a product in an Option and that product is also in other Options, you need to manually go into those Options and save them so the changes will be recognised. Every change you make requires a long waiting period where the system goes up the tree and readjusts everything internally - the more Options in the Option Set, the more Option Sets the Options are used in and the more products within an Option, the longer the wait. We're talking a minimum of 5 seconds for the most simplistic of Sets, and a minute or two for complicated branches. Finally, changes made (especially when actually applying these Option Sets to the store front products) take often up to 10 minutes to actually be reflected on the web site - and some times they just don't take at all. Some times you just have to go back in and save the Sets again hoping this time it will work. Overall, the App works mostly well as far as front end code goes (although a lot of modifications were required to get everything working as expected on our non-Shopify bought theme, a task I expect most people aren't up to). Almost all of the issues come from a complicated and cumbersome imperfect back end, and Bolds reluctance to improve their product as noted by other reviews - which is inexcusable for a subscription product. But when it's working, it shows the potential to be something of great use.