UpPromote Affiliate Marketing

Disappointing Creator Discovery — Expensive, Poor Filtering, and Wasted Time I installed UpPromote for my Shopify store to build a commission-based affiliate program. While the basic affiliate management features seem functional, my experience with the paid Creator Discovery add-on has been extremely disappointing. 1. You pay to discover whether a creator is even relevant. Creator Discovery limits the number of detailed profiles you can view. The Starter add-on costs $39/month and includes just 35 profile views. Essential information, such as audience geography and estimated fake followers, is often only available after consuming one of those views. 2. The “Creator location: United States” filter is misleading in practice. I specifically need creators who can reach U.S. customers. Yet several creators identified as U.S.-based had surprisingly small American audiences. Some had only around 12%, 27%, or 36% of their followers in the United States. I understand that creator location and audience location are different metrics. The problem is that there is no audience-country filter available in the search interface, so you must spend your limited profile views just to discover whether a creator reaches your target market. 3. Search filters are inadequate. Finding relevant creators is unnecessarily difficult. Searching for specific topics such as hair serum or supplements produced no results with my other filters applied. Removing those restrictions returned a large number of poorly targeted profiles that required extensive manual screening. 4. Engagement rates can look impressive while actual video reach is extremely low. I found creators with engagement rates above 7% whose Reels averaged fewer than 700 views. Without carefully examining individual reports, these accounts can appear much more commercially promising than they actually are. 5. There is no clear indication of which creator profiles you've already reviewed. This is a basic workflow feature that should exist in a paid discovery tool. When browsing dozens or hundreds of candidates, it becomes difficult to track previously inspected profiles and avoid wasting limited views. After spending considerable time reviewing creators, I found very few strong matches for my U.S.-focused affiliate program. The combination of limited profile views, insufficient audience targeting, weak discovery filters, and poor workflow management makes this add-on frustrating and inefficient. My recommendation to Shopify merchants: think carefully before paying extra for Creator Discovery. UpPromote needs better audience-location filtering, transparent reach metrics, and proper tracking of previously viewed creators. For a small business trying to build an affiliate program without a large influencer marketing budget, this experience has been particularly disappointing.

Don’t get. This is a total waste of time. Somehow got auto billed $89 when Inever used the app. I had supposedly tried it 6/7 months prior , worthless and didn’t work. . I asked them to refund me since the $89 was for serviced not rendered and they basically told men to beat it and take a walk. I wouldn’t waste your time dow loading. Just a waste of money. .

There are much better applications than this one available. This one is MASSIVELY OUTDATED, compared to the many features and functionalities available with other apps. Also, Support doesn't speak English, so they will not communicate directly or quickly. Email or chat replies come with LONG lag times between questions and responses. Basic functionality is woefully lacking. I was on a PAID plan, not a free plan, but the starter tier of approx $25-30/month, and this is what I experienced: 1) NO ABILITY TO PAY Creators in-app. It's all MANUAL, tracking the payment that happens OUTSIDE the app only, for the free and lower-cost starter plans. Basic functionality that other apps provide, this app WITHHOLDS to force you into an upgrade. 2) NO ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE with creators in-app. You can only "save" a creator profile to a list. However, they WITHHOLD the email from the "save", require you to manually search-populate a blank email field, and they do not offer the capability to email the creator. 3) NO METRICS ON CREATORS. The withhold both the email, as mentioned, and any useful metrics on the creator besides follower count and @handle, forcing an upgrade to a more expensive plan to view. 4) ONLY 5 SEARCHES PER CYCLE. If your search results in 1 creator, then that still leaves you with only 4 searches left. 5) EACH PAGE OF CREATORS = 1 SEARCH If your search results in 150 creators, but the app only shows 10 creators per page, then you do NOT get the benefit of all 150 creators from that search. NO, you only get the 10 creators on that page. And when you click the next page, to see the next 10 from your search, that counts as 1 additional search. EFFECTIVELY, YOU WILL NEVER SEE MORE THAN A HANDFUL OF CREATORS PER MONTH BECAUSE OF THE SEARCH LIMITATION AND THAT ONLY A FEW CREATORS DISPLAY ON EACH PAGE OF A SEARCH. I CONSIDER THIS TO BE MISLEADING MARKETING, PERHAPS EVEN FRAUDULENT MISREPRESENTATION. You only get "unlimited" capabilities if you are in the highest-tier-- again, instead of serving the customer, forcing the PAID customer into the higher plans jut to access basic functionality that other apps provide for the same price as the lower-priced paid plan. 6) UNINSTALLING / UNSUBSCRIBING DOES NOT END THE PAYMENTS If your cycle starts on the 12th of the month, and you uninstall/cancel on the 16th of the month, you will not only pay for the full month (no pro-rated return). YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR 1 MONTH AFTER YOUR INSTALL DATE. This policy is NOT made clear on sign-up and differs from other apps. While not all apps will provide a pro-rated return/refund, they DO stop all future billing after the uninstall. THIS ALSO BOARDERS ON FRAUDULENT MISREPRESENTATION. All-in-all-- this is a terrible app and I would not recommend it to anyone. I can only assume that the 3.7k 5 star ratings are either friend/family/paid or rewarded positive reviews.... or that those reviews are very old, from an era before all the advancement and launch of better apps... because there is no way on earth this is a 5 star app. I don't review apps often. But I consider this to be a public service-- so other people are not mislead, as I was. The app offered to give me "credits", or free searches, in recognition of what was wrong and my dissatisfaction and to avoid a negative review. But, I prefer to be honest-- save some other people- than to benefit from some credits in an app that isn't worth my time to use.

Very bad UI and affiliates are not checked by the UpPromote team propoerly. I'm getting scam and asian trash affiliates. And the same affiliate is trying to submit with different emails. Disgusting app.

merchants cannot select individual products from the dashboard and set different commission rates. the app charges a commission on every sale, which makes it expensive for merchants at scale. frustratingly

Terrible experience Cancelled as wasn't currently using and got charged for 2 more months BEWARE Just remove the app - do not rely on them actually cancelling their end

i uninstalled the day i paid to get my store back up and they still tried to charge me i need my refund...

Customer support person named "Tanie" is quite unfriendly, dont really appreciate it. by paying almost $100/mo for the app, i expect better attitude and service

The Logic Issue: If you have multiple collaborators or influencers (e.g., Collaborator A is linked to SKU 1, and Collaborator B provides a coupon for SKU 2), this app CANNOT handle them in a single order. Their system forced the entire order’s commission to only ONE person, completely ignoring the "Product Connection" I set up for other SKUs. In my case, even though a product was hard-linked to a specific partner, a simple coupon used for a different product in the same cart wiped out their credit. The Support/Attitude: When I reported this as a logic flaw, the support team’s response was incredibly arrogant. They claimed they had "never heard of this request" and refused to fix this fundamental data integrity issue unless I paid for "expensive customization." They ignore the fact that as a Pro Plan subscriber, I expect accurate attribution—it’s the core purpose of an affiliate app! Conclusion: This app is only suitable for very small, simple stores with only one influencer per customer. If you are a professional merchant with multiple SKUs and various influencer partnerships, STAY AWAY. Their "one-order-one-owner" logic will cause you to lose data and damage trust with your collaborators. They care more about charging customization fees than fixing their product's basic logic.

Customer support doesn't have any experience on how affiliate codes work and answer a google ads detection question. If you are going to offer a feature of detecting google ads, you should have some resources and an educated support team to answer my questions. NOT asking me to ask an affiliate that will deny any claim of using google ads. Do better.

Scam app - install it and next thing if you want any feature at all you have to pay far more than $30 a month! What a Joke!

What a scam this is! We never used the app, and even uninstalled it, and are STILL being charged a hefty monthly fee every month with no way of cancellation. We are now in contact with Shopify Support to try to find a solution and a refund. What a hassle!

Cant do that much without paying :(

Does not work and there is no access to customer service. It has been two years. No one has contacted me. My affiliates are selling things but getting no credit so they abandoned it. We lost a lot of business pursuing affiliates who then thought we were just not paying them for links they could SEE from their end. No response ever from customer service.

Terrible UX experience. Not mobile user friendly. Asked the dev team to help, they completely messed up our store pages ( eg: privacy policy, FAQ's, ect ). They were showing the sign up form, and when disabled, completely DELETED ALL INFORMATION FROM THESE PAGES. Absolutely outraged. Deleting app. Never again.

Opened half a year did not receive an order, and can never find customer service

Not only is the description of this product, incredibly misleading, it’s also incredibly hard to use, and on top of it their customer service is absolute trash

We can not open the app now

It says the installation is free, but when you install the app. They provide you 14-day free trial. Once the trial is ended, they don't discontinue. They charged you automatically and said it's based on Shopify rules. You need to check your plan description on this page and be really careful!! It's a trap. Really shame on you guys. You stole my money and refuse a refund.

its too expensive.. 90 bucks for this isn't really worth it.

We installed this app hoping it would provide the tools we needed, but the features were limited and didn’t meet our expectations. The app feels unfinished for a platform that claims to be all-in-one. Customization is minimal, reporting tools are basic, and there's poor support. Automation is limited, making management more manual than expected. It might work for beginners, but it’s not suitable for growing or global businesses. Disappointed overall and we can’t recommend this app.

90-95% of affiliates are from Vietnam/Thailand and will run campaigns on your brand name directly to steal a few orders. Only good if you don't use the marketplace I guess - but then, other apps do it better.

find a different one. crazy expensive

We recently deleted this app after experiencing too many issues with scammers trying to claim commissions on sales that were not legitimately theirs. The most recent case involved a customer who received a 50% discount code from us as part of a product exchange. Somehow, when the sale came through using the unique, one-time-use code, it still got picked up as an affiliate sale — how this happened is unclear, but it's not our responsibility to investigate or solve. Be very cautious if you're considering this app!

Paid for a year subscription and ended our affiliate program early. This app has plenty of bugs and the major one is that the PayPal integration is broken so all payments have to be made manually. I removed the app after 6 months and this company is refusing to even offer a partial refund. Stay away from them as their customer support is awful and the app is full of bugs. You can do the same exact thing that this app does for free with Shopify collabs.

MISLEADING APP DESCRIPTION After being assured that UpPromote included a referral feature I installed the app and started setting it up. After 25 years as an online marketing consultant to companies in 40+ countries, I understand the clear distinction between an AFFILIATE and a REFERRAL APP: A referral app provides once-off rewards to existing customers for introducing new customers - if the new customer places an order then a reward or commission is granted to both parties ON THE FIRST ORDER ONLY. An affiliate app may provide a once-off reward new customers introduced by the affiliate, but the affiliate continues to earn rewards (normally a commission) on all that new customer's purchases for a fixed period or indefinitely. Because Referral Rewards are only paid out once, they can be very large 9even loss-making) as they only happen once and are regarded as the cost of acquiring the new customer. Having signed up for a $29/mo paid UpPromote plan I discovered that the "Referral" program they were providing only allowed rewards that repeated on all future purchase by the new client. This is DISHONEST MARKETING - that is not a referral program but rather an affiliate program. I queried this and they demanded I triple my monthly payment to $89 to enable a referral program with once-off rewards. Then the company claimed that as their customers often incorrectly referred to an affiliate program as a referral program, they felt justified in also incorrectly labeling their $29 plan as a referral program. I have over the years used dozens of both affiliate and referral apps and was delighted to find a combined app, but BEWARE - this company is being dishonest (and IMHO perhaps fraudulent in their marketing claims. I lost faith in this company and no longer trust them or want to do business with them and am now uninstalling UpPromote from my Shopify store. Now the company is asking for a meeting - I wasted so many hours setting the app up and testing it to find it did not do what they promised that am not inclined to waste more time teaching them what it should do.

BEWARE! I signed up for the $89.99 Professional plan with a two week free trial. Unfortunately, it took more than two weeks to find all the flaws with this app, such as the coupon automation not working for all the "outreach" programs and, most importantly, the "Post Purchase" outreach is not linked to purchases in any way. It's linked to acquiring new email addresses. Therefore, if you are asking customers to sign up for email marketing when they enter your store, they'll receive a "post purchase" ambassadorship email - even without purchasing your product. When I realized all the flaws with their software and canceled, unsubscribed, and deleted the app, we were halfway through the first billing cycle. When I asked them to refund the prorated amount for the second half of the billing cycle, they refused. Therefore, they essentially STOLE half a month worth of my money when I wasn't even subscribed to or using their app. Stay away! There are other cheaper apps that do not have flaws and have better customer service in which they do not steal from their customers.

Our company is looking for affiliates. Non of the affiliates we contacted in the Uppromote Market Place had any interest in our product, even with a very fair % commission. Invites were submitted to over thirty affiliates. The app appears to be more suited for those that already have affiliates, and not for companies that are starting with affiliates or are looking for more affiliates. It's too bad as the app is user friendly and appears to function perfectly for companies that have affiliates.

This app has done nothing for us. In the first few months something was missing. We were charged without getting notified that there was an issue. This was fixed. In the subsequent months still nothing was happening; we weren't getting any referrals or sales from this app. For us this app was waste of money. Maybe for other stores it works; looks like this app is getting high ratings. I don't know how. We didn't get much support to replicate other stores' success, if indeed this app boosted their sales.

$800 a year GROSSLY OVER PRICED! WARNING! Those who upgrade to this FROM THE $300 OPTION get offered ZERO discount... That is UNLESS you cancel the next day and they knock off $150 off THE $800, if you select "Was too expensive" - What about those that just buy it? Oh, they get nothing by the way. For me, that's a disgrace in terms of business-to-business ethics The basic set of features are lacking, you cannot even setup auto payment to paypal with the basic version, and the accounting options are all greyed out/missing, or constantly saying upgrade to pro next to them - If you have any subscription-based products where it requires a VERY simple , 3 minute bit of code, they force you to go onto pro which $800 a year

Such a bad Customer services , I tried many times to connect with them , there is no feedback , they mentioned they have 24/7 Live chat option , but after waiting few days , I still not able to find it

We had used another App (BOGOS) developed by Secomapp. The experience was so bad: because of their failure to warn Merchants about a bug of their app that allow users to place 0 value orders from the app, we lost a large sum of money. As a result of this experience, we would not recommend this app to any merchants. And we would warn all Shopify users that we know not to use any app developed by Secomapp.

Started getting inundated with fraudulent orders after installing this app, all linking back to an affiliate. Reached out to customer support, zero support given, just denial. Wouldn't recommend.

VERRY STUPID APP AND SCAMMERS OF ADVISORS . TAKE CARE IT WILL STOLE YOUR MONEY . my money was stole with theyr APP

Cannot open app and support hasn't gotten back to me. Being charged $139USD per month for nothing.

I don't recommend this app They don't have phone support you can only chat with them the person chatting is dealing with multiple people at the same time so you will grow old before you can get an answer, extremely disappointing!!

App makes my whole Shop freeze. It required a external Login and redirect to a Site with endless Pop Ups.

This is a difficult program to set up! And you also have to pay to experience its capabilities! Not worth it! Look for analogues!

The worst app ever! If you care about your SEO, do not install it. The app populates pages in a foreign language that are getting indexed. You can check it on your google search console. As soon as I removed the app the problem disappeared

This app shuts down and prevents you from accessing your data-luckily we had used IG names for the discount so we were able to go back and message each one of our ambassadors. Also, customer service was completely lacking-sent numerous emails and support tickets and never got responses to help us fix the problems. Ultimately we notified our ambassadors and moved platforms.

I believe this company is a scam. I have an affiliate by the name "Puja Regmi" who somehow is getting orders, sometimes multiple, per day. This person has never ordered from me. I also searched this persons code and it has never been used. How can you generate multiple orders every single day, without your code ever being used? SCAM. Do not pay if something seems fishy!

This app fails to capture any orders that are checked out with ShopPay and their customer support confirmed that ShopPay is not supported. Given that a large percentage of orders check out with ShopPay, that makes this app nearly useless - at least to me.

Says that free plan is available, but once i added the APP it was showing the minimum 10$ per month. Also no responses to chat, so deleted.

Low customer service quality. They Don't help too much... the app is ok but need some points to be improves, special the customer service...

People of customer service not very helpful. I send them few simple and constructive questions and they replied me to find other app and not waste them time. I don't understand why this tone... Nice app but customer service need to improve how talk with customers.

I have 800 affiliates and the only affiliate orders I ever get are the actual affiliate ordering for themselves. Additionally, they are double dipping on the orders. I removed this app because it is a scammers heaven and slows down my funnel by giving options to shady people.