Smile: Loyalty Rewards Program

July 25, 2024

Reading some worrying reviews and too many without a reply, although most are positive. Only installed the app yesterday so this might not be the best feedback (I can always update). They would love charging you based on the number of orders but with the free plan the customers don't get to see the points on the product page, account page, checkout and post purchase. The customers are also limited in redeeming the points at the checkout. So on one side, Smile.io would love to make more money if we generate more orders, while restricting our customers experience with their reward system and ultimately our growth and Smile's. This makes no sense.

June 20, 2024

Tout est parfait, tant au niveau des fonctionnalités que du service client. Sauf qu'au final je n'ai pas pu l'utiliser car certains éléments ne PEUVENT PAS être traduits (par exemple les boutons d'action). Cela m'a fait perdre beaucoup de temps et un peu d'argent car évidemment c'est le type de chose dont vous vous apercevez en finalisant l'app. Donc nickel tant que vous restez en anglais, sinon, passez votre chemin.

Oct. 18, 2023

Very basic features for the price... Not worth the money in my opinion. The UI is easy to navigate for users but in terms of value as a merchant, the features are lacking. Point collection is simple for users but if you want to do anything to incentivize users to actually use their points, you'll need to upgrade to the $200/ month plan. With that being said, basically all of the useful features are on the $200/ month plan. If you have the budget, go for it, but to me, the value just isn't there with what you're getting compared to other apps in our tech stack. I wish we would have looked into alternative options before committing to Smile. Hard to switch at this point.

Oct. 17, 2023

Not able to manually translate.

Dec. 4, 2022

Slows down my store considerably. My SEO/site manager tells me to remove it every month. Very glitchy, I can barely access the dashboard most days. Disappointing considering the number of good reviews it has. I wouldn't recommend it.

Oct. 12, 2022

The app sent a prompt asking for a review so I obliged. This app is HORENDOUSLY priced. Yes, there are other options you can use for your store and pay WAY less which I do but I am so disgusted by the sheer audacity of the creators to charge what they do for the most basic of things. There are 3 plans - One for $49 a month, one for $200 a month...Yes, TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS every single MONTH and the last one for $600 monthly. Their free plan is simple and will be enough to get you started with a loyalty program. You won't be able to customize anything about it or add any of your own branding but it will be enough to get going.

Aug. 21, 2022

If your focusing on your SEO this app has many Javascript issues. With a new site Google page insights was giving me a 38 score. With smile.io being the major contributor. I reach out to support to let them know of the details of the Google issues and the app issues Google was able to provide detailed information about and they immediately brushed it off saying it was not them and instead other apps. I did a support video, recorded it in there help chat with an agent to show them what the code issues where on the mobile and desktop analysis. They knew and didnt care and or denied it was them, despite proof. So I deleted smile.io and my mobile speed score went from 39 to 75 instantly! Load spead it one of the number one areas Google looks at to rank your site high in Google searches and improve users from clicking away. With smile my full load time was 10sec after deleting it it went to 3.5sec. Sad to have deleted it but it was the best for my business to rank on google and measurable improve customer experience. Run your page insights before and after and you'll see the load time drop. Even with disabling the button on mobile. Hope they will finally address there code performance issues, this is a much have for shop owner.

March 4, 2022

I have been using this app but seems the upgrade plan price is high , beyond the average rewards program. Even so, I could not send point reminder emails in the free plan thus by now it seems not doing much help for my flower business at the moment.

Nov. 20, 2021

Does not integrate well with POS and other channels like ebay. Can't merge accounts or delete them either. I have some customers that have as many as 7 different entries as customers all with accumulated points because they used a different method of payment. It works fine with the online store but then I'll get people messaging me on ebay saying they received an email about points, signed up and the points aren't there...because they now have two customer profiles in the system. One as a member and one as a guest and the guest account has the points. I thought by adding them as a customer at check out in store on my POS that the points would be awarded to them but nope I have to manually adjust their points. Like I said it works fine if using online store only but if you have multiple channels, good luck because it's a flawed system.

Jan. 15, 2022

The loyalty and referral programs are great, and their support is fantastic! Mackenzie was really prompt in answering all our queries. EDIT: 2022-01-14 After using Smile for a few months, I've reduced our ratings to 2 stars. Two of our biggest complaints are: 1. Terrible UX for discount code redemption: The user "applies" a discount code on the cart page via the Smile nudge, but there is no user visible feedback whatsoever that the code has been applied. About 75% of our customers that create discount codes don't actually end up redeeming them because of this, and we think our conversion rates have actually *reduced*. Our tech team spent significant amount of time trying to fix this on our end, but because Smile runs within an "iframe" there is absolutely nothing you can do. Be prepared for customer complaints that their points redemption isn't working. 2. Mediocre functionality to handle customer refund abuse: A customer can place an order, redeem their earned points and then return their original order. Effectively, they've gotten "free" points. There's nothing you can do to address this, other than manually inspect the points dashboard in Smile and address these cases. Not at all feasible if you deal with a large quantity of orders and operate on thin margins. There are easy tech solutions to this (e.g. Smile could let us delay awarding points by x days), but Smile doesn't support them. Unfortunately we can't really disable the program once we've launched it without aggravating our loyal customers. So we're stuck dealing with these issues while we look for an alternate program to migrate to. Regardless of the app issues, their support team is stellar in their responsiveness.

Jan. 20, 2021

I think too little is offered in the free plan because it is not worth paying for the plans if it is difficult to get persons to sign up. Customization of rewards still has its limits. will rate again at a later date

Oct. 27, 2020

The app is great, but no chance to translate it. Unfortunately this is not good for customers which don't speak english. Hope things will change very soon.

Aug. 17, 2020

Seems like the app would be easy to use if you are starting from scratch. I am trying to convert from another loyalty program to Smile. The app description claims this is possible but I cannot figure it out. I have submitted two help requests and have not received a response.

June 4, 2020

They change the price plan frequently. Imagine a function from $0 to $199/month, I mean the "free product function". Since we have using this app for a long time and there are over 30k members join the plan, I admit that I'm suffering from making the decision about if we should stop using this app. I can pay for the function of course, just think the functions that smile offers does not match their plan price. I'm not sure if this is what they called the "loyalty project", just a little bit disappointed and will not recommend this app to my friends

May 1, 2020

While this app is easy to set up and use, for $49 a month - which is NOT CHEAP - id like to be able to at least gain some deeper analytics that what is currently received - which is almost nothing. Only once were we offered able to offer to our customers a promotion to "double their points" and when i enquired re running this special again, was told it was only offered based on algorithms? i have not seen it since and that was around a year ago. It does not give me incentive to upgrade the account to a more expensive plan and will be looking at alternative apps this year. I would not recommend this app to other business's based solely on the lack of analytics available.

April 17, 2020

It's very very basic and they want you to pay $50 a month for a "starter" plan - too bad it had potential. They also need to learn to incorporate social media into this - I cannot believe they don't. Email is old school

March 13, 2020

Very expensive and sneaky "user based" pricing model (the app automatically syncs up with your Shopify customer data and adds them as "Smile users". No feature to mass delete irrelevant contacts. Ended up paying hundreds of dollars hidden costs... Lots of better apps out there!

Aug. 2, 2020

*Update on previous 4 star review So it seems Smile has decided to pull back what they offer on the free plan and has pushed some of the basic features things to $199USD (not even the $49USD plan) which is dissapointing. I think pulling features back on a "sticky" product is a bit of a sneaky trick because business owners are unwilling to change an app that has lots of their customer data integrated into it. Adding new features to entice people to upgrade or pay is a much nicer way of doing things. My initial annoyance with the app still hasn't been fixed 6 months later and I still have customers wanting to include freebies on the order they just placed, which causes us issues and upsets customers, they need to fix it so that rewards get emailed to the customer after the order has been fulfilled. I'm going to start looking at a new rewards program, this one just isn't working well for us and causes me annoyance on a weekly basis. Great app. would give 5 stars however, please please please can you reinstate reward customers when the financial status is shipped for shopify customers, instead of paid. It is causing lots of admin headaches in our company and upsetting customers. The issue is a customer makes a purchase then gets a reward email immediately then wants to bundle / redeem the reward with the order they just placed, we use a 3PL and don't get always get a chance to change the order and really its not generating return business, instead just costing us money and upsetting customers when we cant combine the order.

Jan. 30, 2020

recently i suffer fm "your points redemption could not be completed, try again later", both customer and admin cannot redeem

Dec. 24, 2019

We've been using this app for about 3 years. Overall I find the app to be missing features that I really want. My biggest sticking point is that the points are awarded right away after purchase. It would be much better from our standpoint if we could set a grace period where the points are awarded after the return policy period has ended. For example, a customer ordered several items from us and immediately redeemed her new points for a free necklace that we offer as one of the rewards. She then returned most of the order, but kept the necklace. She now has a negative points balance from her return and has not made an eligible purchase to get rid of that negative points balance. Smile does not offer a way for us to make sure the customer is keeping their purchase before they receive the points. Another sticking point, the referral promo code link allows people to send coupons to themselves, even if they enter their own email and name that is used for their rewards. In some cases the system has caught it and "blocked" it, but only after the customer has received the promo code and used it! Smile had a feature that excluded promo code purchases from earning points and we had been using that feature for years, until one day it was just gone. When I wrote them and asked them why they took away a feature without notice, they simply wrote back and said nobody was using it. I can assure you that's not true, because WE were using it every day. Now we have to deduct points manually for every ineligible purchase which is a real time waster for us. We also had a backlog of ineligible points that we had to go back and adjust because they did not inform us of the change. Very unprofessional. I've seen much better rewards programs than this elsewhere. We'll be phasing it out. It's more trouble than it's worth.