Snowball: Affiliate Marketing

The product itself would earn 4 stars from us. Onboarding was smooth, our account manager was helpful throughout, and the app is easy to set up and run. Two things to know before installing. First, affiliate marketing attracts fraud, and this app has no real playbook for it. We dealt with more scammers and bad-faith users than genuine customers who wanted to share the brand. Overseas coupon abusers, people gaming referral links, a major uptick in stolen credit cards being used to get referral sales for commission, and constant backend cleanup. We eventually figured out how to limit it ourselves to some degree, but the tooling and guidance were thin, and after running the numbers, the program cost us more than it brought in. That is partly the nature of affiliate marketing, and don't blame SS at all, but go in with eyes open. Second, and this is why the review is 2 stars: the offboarding process. When you uninstall, Social Snowball permanently deletes ALL of your data within 24 hours. Every affiliate record, every commission balance, everything. While I understand there is compliance requirements with Shopify, there is no warning during uninstall. No pop-up, no banner, no dedicated email, no option to export your data first. Zero effort in helping avoid this problem or helping your customers. Due to shipping times, we pay affiliates after orders are delivered (around 30 days for us), so we canceled expecting to log in and send final payments like any normal app billing cycle wind-down. Instead, everything was gone. We now cannot tell who we owe or how much. There is no process native to Shopify to track which affiliate is tied to what discount code. Support from both platforms confirmed there is no recovery and no workaround and Social Snowball did not take the issue very seriously. Absolutely feels like the second we unsubscribed, we were a nuisance and just annoying them with pretty basic requests, trying to simply pay our affiliates. If you ever plan to leave, export everything and pay every affiliate to zero BEFORE you uninstall. Nobody will warn you, so this review is the warning.

Support was very helpful in resolving the issue and providing a solution. - Wayne Pastoral Full-Stack Developer at WAMA

My experience with Social Snowball has been phenomenal. Katie is the best CSM + incredibly helpful and responsive, and Ani is truly the best developer. I absolutely love working with them! They genuinely listen to our needs and even share feature requests with their team for future improvements. Making the switch from Impact to Social Snowball has been life-changing. Nothing but an amazing experience so far!

Helpful support and it works as advertised. Easy to setup and brand ambassadors are happy.

My experience with Social Snowball and their team has been phenomenal. I am impressed by how responsive and helpful they are. I also think it's really cool that if I encounter a need that isn't a feature of theirs yet, they communicate it to their team for consideration for future app improvements. Nothing but a good experience so far.

The team at Social Snowball is great! They're so quick to help and very knowledgeable about all things influencer marketing!

Working with Social Snowball has been a great experience. Their team is responsive, knowledgeable, and always willing to help. The platform is intuitive and easy to navigate, making it simple for both our team and our ambassadors to use. We've been very pleased with the overall experience and have seen our program continue to grow as a result.

Excellent!

Great app to build out a tiered influencer program and track data across sales and social media. Since using it it's made my job easier and processes more efficient with all the integrations it has available.

Social Snowball has been a great tool to add to our affiliate stack. It has made working with our affiliate partners so much smoother, and their team is extremely willing to help with any strategy work needed. Must have!

Working with Social Snowball has been great! Katie has been awesome to work with, and the SS team as a whole has been very helpful. Would recommend!

We are very happy to be working with and using the Social Snowball platform for our affiliate and influencer program. It has helped us scale our program by allowing us to create separate tiers based on each affiliates level of following, engagement, and sales. The creator search tool integration with Meta allows us to easily communicate and discover relevant influencers, and we know that our data is accurate with safelinks, which prevents coupon code arbitrage. Brittany has been great to work with and is always very responsive and helpful with all of our needs. Thank you!

Social Snowball is fantastic. Such an easy to use platform, and their team is extremely supportive.

Social Snowball has been great for us in creating our content creator community called "Calling Dogs". Their support has been really great too, and we're glad we made the decision to work with them.

Working within our industry is never easy, but Social Snowball has made our affiliate platform as easy as possible to work within! The team is super responsive, always sharing best practices and insights, and is always open to constructive feedback. I highly recommend them!

Been working with Snowball for a couple of years and very happy with the product and the team. It makes managing affiliates and payouts dead simple. And the team is always responsive and very helpful over slack. Highly recommend!

Avoid this app, as there is a very good chance that it will not work smoothly. I had problems getting access to search for creators. They said that other customers had similar problems, and they offered a secondary service that they were building as a work around. I said I would consider it, and needed more information. I even scheduled a demo with them to review it. But, that was not good enough for their management. They tried to force me to use this other solution rather than the one I evaluated and paid to have. I could not understand this and asked them to address this differently. Instead, they told me to go away. And, they would not give me a refund as it was my problem that I was not a good fit for them, since they tried to help me with this work around solution -- which, by the way, did not have all of the features and benefits of the product I had purchased. So, I wasted a month of my time, did not get what I paid for, then got told to go fly a kite when it came to the money we had spent -- not to mention our time. Very terrible treatment of customers. And, if you are wondering if this is as I describe, I assure you that it is. I have all the receipts - in the form of screen captured messages from them and their management. Happy to share to keep others from experiencing what we experienced.

Very frustrating experience, constantly uncovering bugs, lack of required features and over attribution. Very manual and time intensive

This app is terrible. I tried to delete the app and its still charging me monthly. Shopify tells you to get in touch with the app developer which we have and they haven't stopped charging us. BEWARE before you install!