Appstle℠ Subscriptions App
Best Subscriptions App for eCommerce Subscriptions | Appstle
Rating
4.9
feedback
4,869
chart
#189
All reviews
Jan. 4, 2024
Terrible to set up bundles: it is probably not worth saving the 500 that Recharge charges for bundles. Their app is great for simple subscriptions, but it takes a lot of work to implement as soon as you go to bundles. The bundle box disappears, it doesn't update with the variants selected and the checkout buttons don't work. They claim that it is either Shopify's or the theme developers' fault, which I interpret as the app was built taking specific themes in mind. My conclusion: it is not worth saving the 500 that Recharge charges for bundles. It means you will spend valuable hours trying to make it work.
Dear Merchant, I am the Merchant Success Lead at Appstle. I sincerely apologize for failing to meet your expectations. I have gone over your store bundle configuration issue and the it has been resolved completely. I would love to personally jump in and see how I can help ensure you have a smooth experience with Appstle. Please reach out to me at [email protected] Looking forward to connecting.
Nov. 21, 2023
I cannot recommend the app. I recently asked for support to set up a shipping profile so customers from a specific country would get free shipping when subscribing to a product, and customers from other countries would still need to pay shipping. What happened? The App has a serious flaw and customers outside these countries that are meant to receive free shipping were not able to check-out at all anymore. I have lost sales due to this app and when raising this to their customer service - their attitude towards the issue was absolutely unacceptable. Instead of being curious to understand the issue they basically blamed me for their flawed app. I cannot recommend this app and surprised they have so many positive reviews.
Hi Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I really apologize for the inconvenience you faced. I have gone over your concerns, and have also connected with the Merchant Success Head who you spoke to regarding the issue. Thank you for providing us the opportunity to connect 1:1 to explain the shipping setup for subscriptions, and to work on your requirements real-time. We hope things are now working smoothly and as expected! Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected] or [email protected] if you have any other questions. We are available 24x7x365.
Sept. 26, 2023
Bug after bug after bug!!! This app is poorly made. I've used it over a year now and every 2 weeks there is a serious bug that needs to be fixed. The ONLY reason I have not switched apps is because they have no way of migrating the subscription data to a new app, so we need to leave the app installed for our older subscriptions. DO NOT USE THIS APP, SAVE YOURSELF THE HEADACHE!!!
Hello, We have checked out the issue thoroughly on our end with our developers, and according to the investigation, we believe something has changed in your theme, and it intermittently loaded our script twice, which caused the widget to show up twice on the product. We have made updated our code now, and things are working fine. We've emailed you about the fix as well. Could you please confirm if the issue is fixed on your end? Please feel free to reach out if you need any other assistance, and we will be more than happy to help. Since Appstle, similar to any other software, is a tool embedded in your store site, any change to your store (theme update or installation of other apps) may sometimes result in overriding or conflicting code. If that happens, please either involve your developers immediately to correct the conflicting codes, or reach out to us. Our support team is highly technical and will be able to fix it immediately.
Aug. 27, 2023
Had to remove the app, installed it for about 1 hour, try to fix a shipping issue (the product was for $0 of shipping in shopify, but the app added a shipping cost of $12 for no reason). Impossible to reach anyone from the US or Canada via customer service, all coming from India. Their english was really bad, and not only did they not solve the issue, but made everything worse. There's so many apps for subscription our there, do yourself a service a choose another. At least you might have a shot at minimally good customer service, and not too many is
Hello. This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I went through your chats with the team. As our Merchant Success Engineer as well as her Manager mentioned in the chats and the custom video guide that she made for your store, your shipping rate was coming from your Shopify shipping profile itself. In fact, that’s why the one-time purchase shipping price and subscription shipping price was exactly the same. Since your one time purchase shipping was $12, for order values below a certain threshold, the same applied to subscriptions too. Let me assure you that no other Shopify native or Shopify compatible subscription app would be able to help you here, unless the shipping profile is created on the app side (which the Manager explained in the video she made). I went over the loom my teammate shared and it was very well-explanatory. And no, shipping on checkout page is not calculated based on IP address. It’s based on the shipping address you enter. As for the location of the team, we are a California based company HQed in Menlo Park. We provide 24x7 support for merchants by having support team across geographies and timezones. Since, your ticket came in at 8 PM PST (outside work hours in the California), it was handled by our team in Asia. I personally did not see any communication or language issues in your chat or video, as our entire team across geographies are native English speakers. Please dont hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any other questions.In fact, I am sharing it here so that others can decide it on their own. And no, shipping on checkout page is not calculated based on IP address. It’s based on the shipping address you enter.
Aug. 25, 2023
don't recommend and customer service is pretty clueless. I installed the app and it wasn't working, the radio buttons were NOT showing up on the product page, so a user could not check what frequency they wanted, and couldn't add it to their cart. I messaged customer service, and the first person said that the shopify theme was overriding the radio buttons and would look into it. Two hours later, no thing, then i messaged again and a new person came on. They had the audacity to tell me it wasn't their app widget and they couldn't do anything about it. They don't even know what their own widget looks like. I showed them proof again it was definitely theirs (it was the only subscription app I had installed, was a new store). Again they said the same thing, it's not their app widget, and they couldn't help. Wow! pretty bad customer service.
Dear Merchant, We apologize for the inconvenience you faced with our app. As explained in the loom videos, the issue you encountered with the radio buttons was related to the widget that was being rendered from your own theme. I am glad we were able to align and get that sorted eventually. We are super glad to have you continue with us! We should have been faster with the support, and I sincerely regret the experience you received from the first representative. We have put them back on training, to ensure we don’t have any gaps in our service and to meet the high bar we have set for ourselves. Please feel free to reach out if you have any further questions or concerns.
April 9, 2023
App is ok but support is not, Mann in particular. I used every resource available but still was unable to resolve issues. When I asked for help I was just given a simple answer and the support chat was ended without me having an opportunity to follow up and Mann never asked if I needed anything else or if my issue was resolved. I have felt with many different types of support through Shopify and this has by far been the worst
Dear Merchant, We are sorry to hear you had a less-than-stellar experience with us. Our intention is never to make our merchants feel that we are unreachable. Our team has curated a short loom video specifically going over the subscription model that you are looking for, explaining limitations and workarounds along with it through the email along with short tutorial videos attached for our Appstle Menu feature as a workaround for your model. If you need any help with the setup or if you would like to schedule a call with our support specialists, feel free to reach out to us anytime. Thank you for your valuable feedback.
April 6, 2023
Great support and 24/7 customer service with amazing service! The features within the app are great and so is the support UPDATE: Support was two faced. Really great in the beginning, but then they don't care about you. Takes multiple requests to get anything changed, long times with no response, and incorrect migration. When we migrated my customers were getting charged full price, you can see how this is not good for business. Took over a week to get this resolved with Appstle support
Dear Merchant, I am the Merchant Success Lead at Appstle. I sincerely apologize for failing to meet your expectations. We have gone through the issues you mentioned and ensured that those are fixed already. I would love to personally jump in and see how I can help ensure you have a smooth experience with Appstle. Please reach out to me at [email protected] Looking forward to connecting.
March 13, 2023
My company has been using this app since September 2022. In that time, our experience has been awful. Do not be fooled by the many 5 star reviews. We went with this app because of the "excellent reviews". Here are the reasons why you shouldn't go with this app: The support team is completely uneducated on the app and could not help me with any issues I brought up from the start. We switched from WooCommerece to Shopify and Appstle promised that we could transfer our previous subscriptions over. The process was on-going even after launching our Shopify site. The support team kept telling us different things and promising a quick turn around, none of which happened. Additionally, the company behind the app is incredibly dishonest about what the app can do and how much it costs. And to make matters worse, the company frequently makes changes to the app without any warning. These changes often break the app, leaving users like myself frustrated and unable to operate our businesses effectively. It's incredibly frustrating to have to constantly worry about whether or not the app will work the way it's supposed to. They recently changed what customization you have control of based on what tier you pay for without telling us. So our widget broke and lost all of our branding. When I contacted support, they asked if we had made any changes to the widget and they didn't understand what "branding" is. I had to dig around the app to discover that they had made this change. Now they want us to pay 3 times what we are currently paying them on a monthly basis. Lastly, the app has a horrid UI/UX design. The layout is confusing and difficult to navigate, and the overall user experience is not enjoyable. It feels like the developers put little thought into making the app user-friendly, which is unacceptable given the high cost of the subscription. Overall, I would not recommend this app to anyone. It's not worth the headache and hassle that comes with it. These are just a few issues we have had over the last 6 months, the list is a lot longer. Save your money and look for a better option elsewhere.
Dear Merchant, I am the co-founder of Appstle. I am sorry to hear that your experience with us hasn’t been great. I went through your tickets. Addressing the main one, in Shopify, whenever a product is deleted/recreated or a variant is updated, a new variant ID will be created. Hence the variants from your old contracts will not be present on Shopify. It will need to be updated. This would be true on any other app as well. However, we do have automation triggers for that at Appstle. On the Migration front, we were restricted by the data we got - as in, it had missing pieces that were critical for a seamless transition from the competition app. That is why we had to go back and forth with you. It’s unfortunately not possible to speed up the migration if the data isn’t right. I would love to personally jump in and see how I can help ensure you have a smooth move from WooCommerce and address any other doubts you may have. Skincare is one of the niches of Appstle, and we have hundreds of skincare category merchants who are very happy with us. I would love to jump on a call to ensure that you are one of them. Please reach out to me at [email protected] --Update We have made improvements in our UI/UX and made it easier and more intuitive for merchants to update settings. Just look at our more recent reviews! We would like you to give us another try and let us know what you think of our new onboarding flow.
Feb. 8, 2023
Looks great but pointless as it does not work with sage pay UK payments. This should be flagged wasted a lot of time and disappointed customers
We are sorry our subscription model did not work for you. We are a native Shopify app and hence work only on the payment gateways allowed by Shopify for recurring orders. Feel free to review this documentation from Shopify: https://shopify.dev/apps/subscriptions#known-limitations Hopefully, we can work together in the future.
Jan. 19, 2025
"Critical Inventory Management Issue - Urgent Support Needed" We are extremely disappointed with the ongoing issue in this app. Orders are being displayed as processed from the wrong location A, while inventory is deducted from another location B. This error has caused significant inventory mismatches, and we are now forced to spend considerable time backtracking to identify and resolve the discrepancies. This problem has severely disrupted our business operations. Despite contacting support, we have not received a satisfactory or timely resolution. This is unacceptable for a service we rely on to manage our business. We urge you to address this issue immediately and provide a fix without further delay. Please treat this as a top priority.
Sept. 21, 2022
This app is like a constantly ticking time bomb. All their app changes are done in real time, so your customers will have a front-row seat to some real messy changes until the developers finally get it right. Which they rarely do, because aside from a very reckless, sluggish team of developers, they have no marketer or designer to explain to them what a good customer journey is. So it falls upon us to try to explain to them things such as why not having quantity selectors in a build-a-box and forcing the customers to go in and out of every individual item just to add them to a pseudo-cart only to then proceed to a real one is a terrible customer journey. The app’s architecture and design are a total mess. You have the regular subscription plan, normally you can choose a build-a-box option, but here, you have to stack that option on top of an existing plan, and for some reason you can enter a discount in both places. And here where it gets even messier: if you enter the discount in the subscription plan, it's built into the price, but you can't have a compare price, and if you enter it in the build-a-box extension, it's entered at the checkout as a discount code. And to make matters even worse, any product added into the build-a-box will forcefully have its own subscription widget, and the only way around it is to disable ALL widgets everywhere. As for their recklessness, here are a few examples: - overriding basic Shopify css elements (your visa, mastercard and other payment logos suddenly line up vertically) - when I tell them about that, they go ahead and ADD more messy code to override the code that’s overriding Shopify’s default - whenever they add a new element, there’s no translation field for it, so if your shop runs in another language, expect English words to always pop up randomly. - subscription widgets aren’t automatically enabled for collections, and there’s no install repository where you can get the code and do it yourself immediately, you have to wait for their team to send you that snippet. (and the response time and/or useful feedback drops dramatically once your trial period ends.) - and when I did get the code it was in broken HTML, so I am thankful I told them to send that to me and not have them run that on our store somewhere. - as mentioned above, all the live changes done without informing us and us having a ‘code red’ every single time. - irresponsible, misinformed feedback: even questions such as “do your subscription + loyalty discounts stack up or are they multiplied by one another?” don’t get a correct answer and you literally have to run the math for them to show their answer didn’t make sense. I could go on and on… In short: unintuitive, unreliable and extremely time-consuming.
Hi, My name is Logan and I'm the Director of Product here at Appstle. Your team has obviously had an bad experience with us and I want to see how I can help. First I want to address some of the points in your review. Our team is working very hard to build out all of the functionality merchants need from us. In the past sometimes we have done this too fast and released features a bit early. Clearly this has created a negative experience for your team. While we do want to continue releasing new features and support our merchants needs, we have made some changes to the way we release features. 1. Our team now announces new updates to all merchants from our dashboard. Features that will change existing experiences will not be enabled by default, and will be fully merchant controled. 2. To improve user experience I have joined the Appstle team, coming from leading ecommerce at a North American Shopify Plus brand. We have made several recent user experience hires as well to address the exact points you made above. Expect to see some massive user experience improvements coming to the app shortly :) 3. We have reviewed the bugs mentioned in this review. Most have been resolved or are in the process of being resolved as a top priority. I'd love to make sure we can address all of your concerns in detail however. We're building fast and learning along the way. One thing is for certain though, our merchants expect best in class user experience and stability. We are absolutely determined to deliver that. If you'd like we can get on a call together and discuss how we can create the perfect experience for you. I'd like to offer that I will handle your requests personally. We are releasing an updated, significantly improved version of our build-a-box in the coming days. We need merchants like yourself to provide feedback so that we are absolutely certain we are providing the best experience possible. If you'd like to get on a call and discuss how we can implement a much improved build-a-box experience, and implement your suggestions, I'd be happy to do so. Send me an email at [email protected] and I'll be happy to help. On behalf on the entire team (they have all read your review) we apologize for the experience you've had with us so far. We'd be over the moon to turn it around for you. Best, Logan
Aug. 10, 2022
This app has really stressed me out. I want to offer our customers a pre-pay subscription option, where we win with cash-flow, and they win with a product discount. However the shipping profiles / settings do not make any sense, as I don't want them to get free deliveries that I don't deem them to be entitled to. I am told it's not possible to create a pre-pay option where our current website delivery charges are applied (free delivery when you spend £40). With the pre-pay option, if a customer spends £40 total spread across 3x deliveries (i.e. we spend 3x the amount on deliveries - about £8 x 3) they get free delivery, which is exactly NOT what I want as we just loose money (if we spend £8 on each delivery, it means we spend £24 delivery for a total pre-pay order of £40). I need them to spend at least £40 for each DELIVERY (so that's £120 total for 3x separate delivery slots) to get free delivery. But apparently this is not possible, which I find really unhelpful. Some of the chat people are helpful, but it takes longer than expected for them to reply and one just left the chat today and was marked as 'away' without warning. I wish there was a phone number I could call so someone could just talk it through with me. Also, when you've created a new delivery profile, these can't be edited. So if you get one little thing wrong that you want to change, you have to do it all again.
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I sincerely apologize for your less than stellar experience with us. Since the time of the review, we have made a lot of feature additions and updates at Appstle, which cover the concerns you have raised. Merchants can now edit/update an existing shipping profile without having to re-create from scratch. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected] or [email protected] if you have any other questions.
Feb. 10, 2022
Reading through the reviews of Appstle overall you get the impression of a very slick app and support. This unfortunately has not been my experience at all. The support at Appstle have not been able to help me to migrate from Bold Subscriptions which is one of the top shopify apps for subscriptions. Every day I try (this has been a multi-day exercise) a new person appears in support. So the conversation starts from zero again. I had hoped this would lead to someone new who understand the migration process and how to do it from Bold, but no one seems to know. I'm guessing that all the reviews for this app are from people who haven't used subscriptions before. So perhaps the overly positive rating is due to a lack of experience in subscriptions. It looked a bit suspicious with the 5 rating, and some reviews stating that they changed their review after the install. If you are aiming to migrate from any other subscription app I'd think about it twice. The app may work in itself, but if you can't get it set up with your existing subscribers smoothly - then I (you'll) never know. More detail on the support given for migration: 1. They ask you for two files but don't explain how to populate or get them from your existing systems 2. The two files contain subscription and customer data in a specific format they want (problem 1 - you'd think a company trying to acquire new customers like me would put some time into understanding how to get the migration data they need - but they haven't - no one in the company knows where to get the data) 3. I've returned countless files and been told sometimes they are partially correct, and other times (amusingly) the same files are now all incorrect 4. You can ask as many questions as you like but it seems they've been told to be friendly but give no actual support. So you get friendly messages that waste your time and apologise for not being helpful. Extremely disappointing. Recommendation to Appstle - take a note from any tech startup - work on your onboarding process and make it as easy as possible. Not impossible. It seems you're investing your time in the wrong places if you want to grow and take market share from other subscription apps.
Hi, This is Ria - the co-founder of Appstle. Sorry, you had less than a stellar experience with us. I have connected with my team, and looks like our Senior Dev is working on your migration data. I believe 90% of the migration is now complete, and there are some minor data discrepancies for which we need your advice, and have reached out to you. Sometimes migration can get chalenging as Shopify is very specific on the data fields and formats, such as country codes and next order dates. Rest assured, our team has prioritized your migration, to make sure it is done accurately, so that your customers have a smooth transition to Appstle Subscriptions. Regards. Ria
July 27, 2021
Great looking app - very poor support and migration. They indicate the ability to migrate from one subscription app to theirs. They are not capable of even doing 1 of the top 2 subscription apps (Recharge) in the Shopify marketplace. Communication is not great (I always have to reach out for updates), often saying they will get right back to us and nothing until I reach out 2 days later. Proof of concept seems great, but without a proper onboarding and support system the app is useless. Perhaps if you don't have a subscription app and are looking at setting one up for the first time... but that wasn't my case. After 3 weeks of trying, I'm out of time to get this to work. I'd advise finding an alternative app if you already have a subscription solution you are looking to migrate from.
This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. Sorry, we were not able to help you. Our Engineers have helped 100s of merchants migrate from other solutions in the past, but as we mentioned in the email, the data you provided us with, was missing a lot of important fields such as billing interval, shipping interval, etc. Our team tried their best to fill in the missing details, but doing so for over 200 rows seemed very risky for your upcoming orders. Hope we can work together in the future
July 22, 2021
Terrible support we are still waiting for a simple task to be done going around in circles with the support! Use recharge instead
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I am sorry you had a less than stellar experience with our app. We were not fully clear about your ask, and my co-founder and Tech Lead reached out to you several times, to set up a call with you, to get clarity. Please let us know a good time to connect. You can reach out to us through email or the chat widget. We are happy to jump on a call anytime. Regards, Ria
Dec. 10, 2023
Dec 10, 2023 UPDATE: STAY THE HELL AWAY. THEY JUST DOUBLE AND TRIPLE BILLED HUNDREDS OF OUR SUBSCRIPTIONS. WE HAD TO MANUALY FIND, CANCEL AND REFUND OVER 300 ORDERS AND LOST OVER A DOZEN SUBS. YES THEY OFFERED A 20% DISCOUNT AFTER APOLOGIZING. JUST A LOT OF HEADACHES. TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A MIGRATION STRATEGY... January 9, 2023 UPDATE: Like I said before, they will pacify you, blame Shopify, tell you they opened a ticked with Shopify, and you will never hear from them again. Still have not heard from them - supposedly they opened a ticket with Shopify - but they were very quick to reply to my review update / change on Dec 5 when I dropped them to 1 star. December 5, 2022 UPDATE: After approximately 16 months of using the app, I am changing my rating just because of lack of support. Support has really gone so downhill over the last 6-9 months, it is sad!!! Changing my 5-star review to 1 star because response time has become unacceptable. I was probably one of their first 100 customers. I have over 4000 subscriptions and have been very patient but really their support has become an issue. It's not just "growing pains" anymore - they will pacify you and/or blame Shopify until you're blue in the face - to the point where you just give up and try to find a workaround.
Dear Merchant, As we shared the error, it's coming while invoking Shopify API. We are filing a partner ticket but until then, we can't do anything about it. We are not seeing that issue with any other store, hence we will need to consult with Shopify on it. Regards, Ria