Appstle℠ Subscriptions App
by Appstle Inc. · launched
View in Shopify App Store ↗Reviews (8896)
I must upgrade to business to cancel some fraudulent orders. Almost impossible to downgrade or cancel app subscription.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, Co-Founder of Appstle. Canceling or pausing a subscription contract does not require a plan upgrade. It is available on the FREE plan. You can upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time from the billing page, including moving back to the Free plan without being locked into a paid plan. The Free plan's features and limits are clearly outlined on our Shopify App Store listing, Billing page in the app, and website. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out at ria@appstle.com. Best, Ria
THE WORST. This app mis an absolute nightmare!! It is so time consuming and frustrating. I don't have an hour to sit in front of the computer and add all of the things to customer profiles! It also took forever to add products. There should just be an "ADD ALL" to the subscription. They should be able to change and add everything in their own accounts by default. Why am I adding that? My God... how do i get my 45 minutes back?
While I was talking with Appstle support, my Shopify account was compromised. Approximately $4,500 was transferred from my Shopify account, and there was a later attempt to make about $2,500 in charges on my Shopify credit card. Shopify locked my account for suspicious activity, and the incident remains under investigation. The timing has left me with serious concerns about my experience.
Developer reply ·
UPDATE: 1. Per screenshots shared by merchant with Shopify and Appstle, the unlawful activity happened via merchant's own sign in credentials, and not Appstle's collaborator account. 2. The timestamp of the unlawful login was before Appstle had any collaborator access to the merchant's store. 3. Per Shopify restrictions for collaborators that the Shopify team shared as a part of the investigation, Appstle and other app partners CANNOT and DO NOT have access to merchant's credit card or finances. Only their staff do. Relevant links are below: - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/users/security/collaborator-accounts - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/finance/shopify-balance/managing-account/view-account-info#allow-staff-to-view-shopify-balance-account-activity 4. Shopify is working with merchant on new login credentials and security. FIRST RESPONSE: This is Ria, the Co-founder of Appstle. We've conducted a thorough review. First and foremost, Shopify collaborator access is strictly limited to the permissions granted by the merchant. Based on Shopify's collaborator permission model, collaborators DO NOT HAVE ACCESS to a store's payment methods or the ability to add, modify, or use a merchant's credit card. That said, we'd genuinely like to understand what happened and help you get to the bottom of it. We take concerns like this extremely seriously and have started a high-priority ticket with Shopify to investigate this ASAP. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime at ria@appstle.com. We're committed to understanding what occurred and resolving this matter as quickly and transparently as possible. We are there for you every step of the way.
I love the functionality of Appstle, but I recently reached a threshold for my free account, and was immediately prevented from accessing my subscribers list, unless I upgraded. I struggle to see how this is acceptable practice. I understand that they need to make money but to deny access to existing subscribers and demanding money is blackmail. Surely a more reasonable way is just restrict the amount of subscribers, so no new subscribers can sign up until that threshold has been upgraded. It’s a shame as I was planning on taking out a paid plan. I won’t be doing that now.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. There seems to have been a misunderstanding and I’d like to clarify it. While exceeding the plan threshold restricts access to merchant dashboard, it DOES NOT affect your subscription business. Your existing subscriptions, renewals, customer portal access, and new sign ups (i.e) new subscription purchases continue as normal. At no point is your current revenue or revenue growth hindered. In fact, we continue to support it. The Free plan is designed to support merchants as they grow, with its limits and policies clearly outlined on our Shopify App Store listing, pricing page, and website. Looks like our manager had reached out to you to help you as well, during your conversation with our Engineer. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime at ria@appstle.com if you have any further questions.
they charge $200 for webhook intergration, avoid at all cost, that is a scam all other programs include this with the basic paid plans for FREE.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. We’re sorry to hear that the webhook pricing felt disappointing to you. We work hard to keep our app as one of the most price-competitive options in its category, especially considering the features we provide. We also offer Zapier and Shopify Flow triggers on our free tier, so merchants have automation options available without additional cost. However. Webhook support is different because it relies on a third-party service that has a direct cost for us. Due to that, we charge separately for this specific feature. Hence, we respectfully disagree with calling it a scam, as charging for an optional feature with significant external costs is a normal business decision. Pls feel free to reach out to me anytime at ria@appstle.com if you have any further questions.
Very frustrated with this app right now. The tags are not working properly. Customers are remaining tagged as active after they cancel. I have over 50 instances of this happening in the recent months causing all kinds of headaches. I can clearly see the activity logs and the breakdown, but their developers simply state they can't recreate the issue. Pretty unfortunate as I have been with them for years... and pay for the business plan.
Developer reply ·
Thank you! We're glad to hear the app is working well for you. Your review motivates us to keep improving and delivering great service!
Apps is still charging us in spite of uninstalling it
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. Please note that all app billings are processed by Shopify, and we do not have any control over it. That said, we completely understand that the app was not used during this period, and we're happy to offer a refund. Please reach out to us at support@appstle.com.
Load to cart takes forever to load for customers and sometimes doesn't load at all. We hired a Shopify partner to set up our website using Appstle and between the two of them we can't figure out why this is happening. Each party blames the other and a solution is never provided.
We ran into issues with both utilizing features and working with their support team. It's better for the sake of our business and our customers that we have no subscription system rather than try to continue with their support team.
Run far away. We’ve used this app for a while, and it has only gotten worse. We’ve dealt with constant issues, and their support team is consistently dismissive, deflecting blame onto Shopify and refusing to take responsibility, even when we provide proof. The positive reviews are either fake or from stores that aren’t doing enough volume to notice the problems yet.
Developer reply ·
Hi, We’ve reviewed our records and can confirm that only one order was created and charged. Two billing attempts were triggered. The first attempt failed due to a temporary payment-gateway limitation on the provider’s end, so no charge or order was completed. The second attempt was successful, resulting in a single valid order. Since you’re seeing an order associated with the failed attempt, we’ve raised a partner ticket with Shopify to investigate this discrepancy. The ticket ID has already been shared via email. We’ll update you as soon as we receive Shopify’s response. Please let us know if you have any questions in the meantime.
After being with this app for years I'm beyond frustrated with them. They have a habit of deploying features without fully testing all use cases and when it crashes and causes the store owner huge problems they tell you to talk to shopify, it's all because of limits with shopify. They didn't use to be like this but now that they have multiple apps the customer service has gone down and the amount of time i'm needing to spend trouble shooting and fixing things has gone way up. I recently added a pre-paid gift plan for the holidays to our subscription box after checking with their customer service team that it would suit my needs and that I was setting it up correctly. Unfortunately this pre-paid subscription creates multiple shipments that are scheduled inside the single original order rather than individual orders for each shipment, but the 3PL can not see the scheduduled orders once they move from scheduled to unfulfilled so orders are not being fulfilled and I don't have a way to send it to the 3PL other than to manually create a new order. But it gets even better, the original order can't be altered in any way so I then have an unfulfilled shipment sitting in shopify which screws up the inventory, shows google that I don't ship on time and is generally a customer service nightmare. And after recording looms to show the team what was happening and spending my morning with them they have said I have to talk to shopify about this. All of this right before my black friday deals start when I have no time to spend days on support calls with shopify.
Very bad support team, they reply in an hour for a small query. Adam & Richard are very irresponsible, they get lost once they say "I am checking it"...
This app is not working with Shop Pay and it's critical for our customers to be able to use Shop Pay for their subscriptions. We've verified other Appstle users have the same issue with Shop Pay failing with a "Transaction failed Checkout is currently unavailable due to technical problems. Please try again in a few minutes." popup error. Shopify Plus support tracked it down and we are currently waiting for resolution. It's day 5 currently and I expected resolution more quickly but Appstle was quick to shift blame to Shopify & Shop Pay when the error was clearly there the whole time. Thankful for Shopify Plus support to make it so clear.
Way too expensive for what it does. I paid $100 a month for this app for over 5 months. Rip off for sure. It should cost like $5.00 a month or be tiered for sales.
Developer reply ·
Thank you for your feedback. We understand that pricing is an important consideration. The $100/month plan you were on is our Business Premium plan, which is one of our more feature-rich and compute-intensive plans. It's designed for merchants who need access to advanced capabilities. That said, it’s possible that the plan may not have been the right fit for your business needs. We do offer more cost-effective plans, such as our Starter plan, which begins at a much lower monthly rate and may align better with your requirements. Our pricing model is thoughtfully built based on two main factors: - The feature set you need - Your subscription revenue Compared to other subscription apps in the Shopify ecosystem, we aim to remain one of the most competitively priced options available, while offering state of the art and robust functionality. We’d love to discuss this further, and help guide you to a plan that better suits your business. Please feel free to reach out to our support team at support@appstle.com, so we can assist directly. We are available 24x7x365.
App seems good, with nice design but it is unusable! They don't provide built in option to translate manually to multiple languages. They are pushing 3rd party translation apps, that are very limited without paying for them. This problem should be fixed ASAP. You should aviod it if you want to service more than one market.
Developer reply ·
Based on store and intercom chat evidence, this review has been flagged to Shopify as a competition malpractice.
Disappointing response to payment issues when customers change credit card details. After many many phone calls / web chats and attempts to get this resolved appstle and shopify have not done anyting to resolve this ongoing issue. So what happens is when a customer who is on a subscription plan needs to change their credit card for whatever reason (and has paid via "Shop Pay") due to the nature of Shop Pay their subscription fails and payment method cannot be updated (yes I have seen the instructions but they do not work). There is no workaround other than them deleting their subscription and starting again (Which may also not work due to the insidious nature of shop pay) So you will 100% loose customers in this situation, like we have! Appstle will say this is a Shopify issue and they have no control over shop pay but the fact is it affects their app in an extremely poor way and it needs to be resolved!
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We’re truly sorry to hear about your experience and the confusion around testing with the Bogus Payment Gateway. To clarify, the Bogus Payment Gateway is only supported on Shopify development/test stores—not on live stores. Since your store is a live one, this is why the test subscription order couldn’t be completed using that method. For testing on live stores, Shopify requires enabling Shopify Payments in Test Mode. This is the only supported way to test subscription flows with real stores. As a third-party app, Appstle does not control or manage payment gateways—we rely entirely on Shopify's infrastructure for processing billing attempts. We’ve shared Shopify’s official guide (https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/testing-shopify-payments) on how to activate test mode with Shopify Payments, which allows you to test subscriptions properly. Please feel free to reach out directly if you've any questions or concerns—we’re here to help.
The Build-a-box feature is confusing for customers in their portal which is also confusing to use, and customer service will answer a message but is not always able to help. You cannot customize anything about the product page on your website unless their developers do it and they do not answer back to our messages. It's always "our developers will respond in 24-48 hours" and they never respond back. Even if you open a new message thread it is the same endless loop. I am constantly having issues with this app and we lose money on top of having our reputation with our customers damaged because our build a box subscriptions are confusing to use. I do not recommend this app.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. I have gone over your ticket. We'd like to highlight that a wide range of built-in customization options are available for product pages, Build-a-Box, and the customer portal, which can be managed directly from your end. For merchants who prefer hands-on assistance, we offer complimentary customization support within our app's scope. Please feel free to reach out to our 24x7 available support. You can also email me at ria@appstle.com.
The absolute worst customer service ever. Did not show up to initial meeting, late to rescheduled meeting, were supposed to send me instructions to start migration and then disappeared even though I emailed them and reminded 3 times. App is good customer service is beyond bad.
"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.
Wasn't able to get the app to work. Wasted all week with customer support, Support were trying to assist but they were just constantly confused and there was constant communication issues. After trying for a week, we've decided we've wasted enough time.. Time to use another app
I’m on the highest-tier plan and use the app’s API, but a basic feature like sending 20+ requests isn’t working. They’ve been trying to fix it for nearly a week, halting my automation and business processes. I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone needing more than basic subscription features.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I apologize for the delay in your ticket. Typically these issues are escalated internally for fast resolution, but there was an unfortunate human oversight in doing so this time. Looks like the Senior developer is in touch with you now. Please reach out to me anytime at ria@appstle.com. Once again, we sincerely apologize.
I have held off writing this review as long as possible but have not been able to get a resolution from Appstle support. During migration our customer data was mixed up, attaching the personal details of one subscriber to another in a visible manner. Instead of looking into this and providing solutions, the Apstle team started updating customer details without consultation, erratically and incorrectly, causing even more damage. At this stage we are not sure of the subscriber loss but it will be significant. I don't feel that the Appstle team has treated our data or our business with any level of integrity through this process. I'm honestly shocked they are permitted to operate in this way.
Developer reply ·
This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I am sorry your migration experience was less than smooth. I looked into the issue, and the errors in the first batch of imports caused an issue. I see that you are now co-ordinating with Hemant to get this ironed out. We will be monitoring this on priority to ensure your start with Appstle goes smooth. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime at ria@appstle.com
j'étais contente mais après les modifications faites, mes produits ont disparus et il y avait deux fois le même point sur mon site. J'ai demandé d'arranger les erreurs et la personne a dit qu'elle n'a rien fait et m'a envoyé une video. Apres avoir insister en lui disant que je ne sais pas comment faire car je n'ai pas touche a changer des produits et que mon site a ete cree par un professionnel, il a finalement modifier ses erreurs. donc en resume en general ca se passe bien mais vraiment aujourd'hui c'etait pas top du tout donc je mets une etoile pour aujourd'hui.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. We understand how the appearance of two subscription options on your product page could have caused confusion and frustration. I would like to explain the situation thoroughly, and clarify what happened. Upon reviewing your case, we discovered that the issue was not due to any change we made, but was a result of a pre-existing configuration. Specifically, the product was added to two subscription plans, which led to the two subscription options/widgets displaying on your product page. This setup had been in place before we made any updates or changes, meaning that no action on our part contributed to the problem you experienced. Once you informed us of the issue, we immediately investigated the cause and resolved it within just a few minutes. To ensure you fully understood what had happened, we also shared a screencast video that demonstrated how the product had been added to both subscription plans. Additionally, we provided an explanation of the steps we took to resolve the issue and ensured the product page was displaying correctly. We genuinely appreciate your feedback and are always working to provide all our merchants with a smooth and seamless experience when using our app. Your satisfaction is our highest priority, and we are committed to clarifying any further questions you may have. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime at ria@appstle.com.
It says its free until $500 but then to be able to use it they tell you that you need to pay this and that. Then you’re jus loosing you’re time setting up this app to find out after about prices that were not advertised before. THIS IS NOT OK !!!
Developer reply ·
This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I apologize for any confusion you’ve experienced and would like to provide some clarity. We have multiple pricing tiers, as outlined in the Shopify listing page. The plans are based on monthly subscription revenue of the merchant as well as the sophistication of the features. In the FREE plan, the subscription widget setup in product page in available. We believe this feature is essential to get up and running in subscriptions, and hence is a part of the free tier. I believe our support engineer demonstrated this feature for you. Please find below the relevant links where our pricing plan is outlined: - Shopify Application Listing Page: https://prnt.sc/C2VPudvabNy5 - Application Billing Page: https://prnt.sc/dATFgONC6tQK - Website Pricing Page: https://prnt.sc/16a6Pbs6ohaK - Working Widget on Your Product Page: https://prnt.sc/9VD8K1b7PWle Beyond having the subscription widget on product pages, you had requested the integration of the widget on your store's custom landing page. As outlined in our pricing plans, this feature is included in our Business plan and higher tiers. This information is stated on our application billing page, pricing section, and website (all links are shared above). Appstle's pricing tiers and feature gating are based on the development cost, infrastructure, 24x7x365 support, etc. At Appstle, we are committed to transparency, and the pricing information is available across multiple platforms shared above. If you have any further questions or need assistance at any time, please email me at ria@appstle.com. You can also reach our 24x7x365 support team at all times. Our team always strives to go over and beyond to help our merchants succeed. Thank you for your understanding.
Do not migrate to Appstle from another system! The migration has been a disaster and we have lost tens of customers and a lot of revenue. Appstle's customer service are helpful, and Muhammad in particular is very good, but the software is appalling. Even though it was more expensive, I should DEFINITELY have stayed with Bold.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. Thank you for your candid feedback. We sincerely regret the difficulties you encountered during your migration to Appstle. We fully understand the frustration caused, especially when it results in lost customers and revenue. Migration Issues: We recognize that the migration from Bold involved unexpected challenges, particularly the missing variant IDs and product URLs in the data from Bold. This required manual intervention on your part, which added complexity and delays. We should have been more supportive during this time, and for that, we apologize. Security Challenge Emails: We understand that the security challenge emails were a major concern. We would like to mention here that these emails were triggered by Shopify’s security system, and not by Appstle. We’d reached out to Shopify support on this. We appreciate your mention of our Manager's efforts, and we are glad that our customer service has been helpful. We would love the opportunity to make things better this time. If you’re open to it, we’re committed to working closely with you to ensure a smooth experience. Thank you again for your feedback.
Worst experience ever. I never write bad reviews but I feel compelled to warn others against the repeating issues I faced. The customer portal was always having issues. repeated issues. sometimes double processing issues. the worst. When I would reach out to tech support they would say "looks good on our end" as if they had no responsibility for fixing their coding issues. I stayed with Appstle far too long. Now I have new subscription app with amazing tech support and I am kicking myself for not jumping ship earlier. buyer beware.
Developer reply ·
Dear Merchant, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. Thank you for the 1.5 years you were with Appstle, and we are sorry the last few weeks' were not up to the mark. While we regret that your final experience led to the feedback, I'd like to address the points. We hope you give us another try. Customer Portal Issues: Customer portal is an integral part of our app, and our team ensured that every reported issue was thoroughly investigated. After multiple checks by our team, the portal was confirmed to be fully functional each time you reached out. In instances where adjustments were needed based on your specific setup, we provided detailed guidance and solutions to help optimize the experience for your customers. We have now added a more detailed and step by step guidance document and video, to help merchants setup their perfect customer portal. Also, we are always available 24x7 to real-time guide merchants anytime needed. Double Processing of Orders: The double-processing issue was linked to a setting in the app that allowed customers to modify their billing intervals. This was a feature enabled by you, which is designed to offer flexibility to your customers. When this issue arose, our team provided personalized instructions, including screencast videos, to help you disable this feature. These settings are always fully within your control. We have now added more merchant tutorials within the section, and switched to an easier merchant UI, to make the settings navigation very easy. We hope you will consider us again in the future as we continue improving and evolving our services.
In order to add subscription functionality, the app will delete your existing product and recreate it. In the process, resetting SKU, and shipping weights without notifying us before hand. Ended up messing up many of our ongoing orders and costing us significant time to clean up.
Developer reply ·
Hello, This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. Our app DOES NOT delete and recreate existing products to add subscription functionality. That is a convoluted and wasteful process. Appstle is natively and exclusively built for Shopify and Shopify Plus platform, and connects the subscription plans to your existing products in Shopify. Therefore, there WILL BE NO CHANGES TO SKUs, shipping weights, or other associated details. Appstle Subscriptions is currently and actively used by 26,000+ Shopify merchants and it is the above Shopify integrated process for all. I have poured through our intercom chats and emails, but did not find any communication or ticket from you regarding this. Our merchant support team is available 24/7/365 and would be happy to assist you. Pls ping us on the chat widget or email us at support@appstle.com. Furthermore, one of our Relationship Managers has also reached out to you on the email we found on partner dashboard to guide you. We value your business and are committed to ensuring your satisfaction with our app. We would love to provide further assistance on this.
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.
Developer reply ·
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 hussain@appstle.com Looking forward to connecting.
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.
Developer reply ·
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
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
Developer reply ·
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 support@appstle.com 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.
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.
Developer reply ·
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.
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
Developer reply ·
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.
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
Developer reply ·
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 hussain@appstle.com Looking forward to connecting.
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.
Developer reply ·
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 ria@appstle.com --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.
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
Developer reply ·
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.
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.
Developer reply ·
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 logan@appstle.com 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
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.
Developer reply ·
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 ria@appstle.com or support@appstle.com if you have any other questions.
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.
Developer reply ·
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
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.
Developer reply ·
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
