Appstle℠ Subscriptions App

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

March 15, 2023

It's been extremely frustrating working with Appstle as our subscription management app. We've been trying to fix all issues and talk to the developers, but things don't improve, they don't really take their time to understand what we are asking, and what is not asking and work towards answering or fixing them. Sometimes they answer by saying they don't have a certain feature and in fact, they do, their customer service just doesn't know it. The only reason we haven't left Appstle is that every time we change a subscription app it affects OUR customers' experience and we don't want to cause another friction with them until we find a better app/solution. I would NOT recommend purchasing/adding this app to your Shopify store, and if you have one to recommend to us, please do, we'd really appreciate it.

March 14, 2023

The app doesnt even work. It does not show up in the product page and there is no way to customize it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sept. 28, 2021

Updated review Sep 28 2021 After working with the app for 2 months and with the support team, I've decided to update my review. One thing I will mention straight off the bat is that the level of support and attention went down considerably when the Appstle team got their 5 star rating. I am (still) experiencing bugs in their app and was promised a fix 3 weeks ago, but none to be found. This is after multiple emails, chats and follow-ups. I had to repeat explanations of the same issues to the support team multiple times, and there were one or two moments where something was "fixed" that wasn't a problem in the first place. Although I wanted to work together to find a solution and make this app viable for my store, the Appstle team is not meeting me halfway, so I am currently searching for a replacement app. ------------- Original Review August 3 2021 What makes Appstle Subs so good is the support that goes along with it. There were a couple of tweaks I wanted to execute and Dharmik was a great help with that (super patient too). I will say that we are not yet live with this functionality, so we have yet to see how it works in practice, including the customer management piece of it. Will keep everyone posted on how that goes, but in the meantime, I'm satisfied.

Sept. 24, 2021

TWO WEEKS trying to get payment sorted so our existing customers can log on and manage their payment details. They are still unable to do this. Advice is repeated despite not working. Awful service, response times are pathetic.

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.

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

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.