Genex Formulas review for Wholesale Gorilla
Jan. 14, 2020
What it can do and what it can not. What it is good at: Easy to install Creating discount codes is a snap. Support emails are answered in an acceptable amount of time. Using the app within the Shopify store is seamless and, for the most part, quite easy. Shipping options are a nice touch. What it is not. No Retail pricing is visible once logged in. All pricing across the entire platform is changed with no option at all to show what the retail pricing is. So basically, the wholesale customer has no idea how much they are saving. This, of course, always prompts many emails from customers asking why all the pricing is not discounted or asking if we have a retail sheet to send them, which is what we ended up doing. It is either that or telling them to log out of their account so they can see the retail pricing and then log back in. We have since started sending them a link to a page with the pricing. This also is not a great solution though since it is just another thing we have to keep updated and maintain. No way to modify the wholesale submission form. It would be nice if they allowed us to add some custom fields but unfortunately, they do not. In our case, we have specific questions we wanted to get answered to see if they were a good fit. Since this app runs through a proxy, they do not allow any control over the app. So even minor tweaking is not an option. Therefore we had to set up our own custom submission form to incorporate the fields we needed. No export of discounts available. If you have many different types of discounts for different customers like we do, then maintaining them becomes cumbersome. You would be best to make a spreadsheet (yet another thing to maintain) that has all of your discount codes and the amounts off etc. since there is no export option available. You would think this would have been an easy one, but after reaching out to them on this, nope. I was told this was a great idea and that they would consider it for a future update, but that was a while ago, and it is still not an option that I can see. Poor communication with their customers. Don't get me wrong, if you submit a request, they will contact you back in an acceptable time frame. They are polite and professional. Unfortunately, they have no communication in regards to their app. How often is this app updated? I genuinely do not know, they never say. If it is often, there is nothing I can see that is any different. I use other Shopify apps and regularly get emails from them regarding updates and new features. It would be nice if wholesale gorilla followed suit. No ability to change anything Aside from not being able to change the submission form, unfortunately, there is not much that can be done with this app outside of what it is. Most customizations they offer do work pretty well, but depending on your case use, you will run into issues where you would like to customize something that is just not possible. The proxy issue kicks in, taking this app down a few pegs. Conclusion First off, it is not my intention to say not to use Wholesale Gorilla. This is a slick little app that is quite easy to use and understand. For the most part, it is intuitive and does not have a large learning curve. Most people should be able to master it in a very short time. It has helped our company save quite a bit of time and aggregation dealing with wholesale orders. If you are a small company with light activity and a small number of products, this app could be a good fit. That said, once you start to grow, there are a few cracks that make this app start to lose its charm. Little inconveniences begin to add up and eventually force you to start asking yourself some questions. For the price of $30 per month, you are close to the cost of opening up another Shopify store, which can deal strictly with wholesale customers. This is another level of maintenance, but depending on your needs may make more sense. And while we have not tried other wholesale apps, we are looking to see if any of them may fit our needs better. In the end, this app will work fine for many, but if you are similar to us, you may want to look at a different solution, or at least know what you will be facing if you do decide to use Wholesale Gorilla. While this app might work and be a 5-star app for some, for our needs, I would rate it at a 3 1/2 star option.
Thanks so much for the thorough feedback. We want to provide our merchants with the most useful set of tools we can, so these comments are super helpful. A number of these feature requests are actually already in the pipeline or have been recently released: Show retail price: We released a feature to show the retail price to wholesale customers a few weeks ago as a number of merchants were interested in this feature. Modify wholesale customer signup form: This is another top request so we definitely plan on introducing more customization options for this in the near future. If you have any specific requests feel free to email our support address so we can keep them in mind as we build this out. CSV import/export: Apologies if you are not happy with the release timeline for this feature. When it comes to development work we have to juggle a long list of required and requested updates, and some things have to take priority depending on overall customer needs and volume of requests. This is fairly high on the list though, so we'll be sure to include it in a future release. Customer communication: We usually post messages and news on the homepage of the app itself, but since merchants might not open it on a regular basis once they have everything set up, better communication via email is a great idea. Thanks again for taking the time to give your feedback. These are just as helpful to us as for potential customers of the app. We are always looking to make things better and are excited for the updates we have planed for 2020.
