The Microbrand Store

When our old Shopify image zoom app stopped working, we tried a lot of alternatives, and liked this one the best since it is very smooth looking and super easy to set up. However, like most other image zoom apps we've tried, it had some bugs with our 7 year old theme, which lazy loads our product images in the background. On the off-chance the Mgroup team might take a look, (we didn't expect much help/involvement for the couple of dollars monthly fee,) we pinged them during the weekend to let them know the issues, knowing that unfortunately it likely wasn't a simple fix. What a fantastic surprise was in store for us. On Monday they looked at our implementation and came up with a perfect fix the same day, after a few back and forth emails. They even gave us an easy CSS snippet so we could customize things a little differently the way we'd like. 20 out of 10 for super professional, fast, and helpful expert tech support. 10 out of 10 for a great looking pinch and zoom lightbox with a nice extra loupe for our desktop users, 10 out of 10 for a very decent price. We don't normally want to try an app with just a single review but we're super glad we took the chance here. If you are looking for an image zoom lightbox for your product page's image gallery that doesn't replace the look of your existing gallery, (something some other apps unfortunately do,) then we can't recommend this one enough. A very nice experience for our store visitors and fantastic customer support.

Wanted to redirect traffic from an old page to a new page and this worked great. Took me all of 2 minutes to install, hide the old page, (so I could optionally bring it back later,) and set up the single redirect in the app.

We've used this app for a couple of years and its been great. Recently however it has created ~25 $0 discounts per day, flooding our Shopify discount list and taking a long time to clean out months of junk discount codes that have recently appeared. It shouldn't be creating any discounts at all and just use the ones we've created to plug in to it. Staff couldn't find their discount codes for customers which were pages away. We normally have less than a dozen discounts. Sad to see it is badly behaved like this, and looks like we may have to pull the plug and try and find an alternative. Other recent issues we've seen include the pop-ups occurring too frequently in a session instead of once, the close button not having an x on mobile. Feels like it is no longer a robust option for us.

UI is straightforward with decent rule options such as allow, redirect, or show blank page (after loading complete.) The last option is a nice soft block option as you can hide your store from folks and make it look more like a bug rather than making it obvious they're blocked. However, this has one fatal flaw which has been tested over the last month. Even with lightish traffic, say 1k sessions per day, you cannot use the main search log function to look for specific occurrences. It always consistently times out. If you want to see if someone who is blocked (say someone posting fraudulent orders frequently) and you have a rule in place to block them, you could see log entries that triggered the rule from the rule but only for the current day. Thus you have no way of looking back over a longer period of time for specific rule traffic or doing any general searches, even with current traffic. Having an unsearchable log makes this a not so good solution. Things worked great at first when we didn't have a large log stretching back months so probably this is just a database optimization/indexing and query issue. If this was fixed, by allowing rules to display hits going back further than 1 day, and by allowing paginated log searching over a date range that doesn't time out, then it would be a 5 star app. We'll probably look to evaluate alternatives since not being able to search logs is a critical failure.

Super fast support from the team and app works really well with invaluable features vs a more typical social media chat integration. We can see what a customers is looking at, their session history and demographics and what they're typing before they submit which is a real time saver, and the ability to edit a response if a customer is offline came in handy. This app's a keeper for us and has been really reliable. Would be 5 star if the app didn't very frequently start new sessions for registered customers coming back to chat so we don't have past chat history and have to keep spending time checking for the name or email provided. We get that folks clear their cache or disable some tracking, but we see this a lot with customers who keep providing their details and haven't removed past data.

Support from the developer has been awesome. We had to quickly switch from a different chat app that Shopify was zapping and tried a few out. Some others had bugs that annoy customers such as if you opened a chat then closed it, it'd re-open when you went to a different page view in the store. This one was nice and clean but we had an issue where it wouldn't work if a user wasn't logged in on their browser to Facebook. That's not a problem for desktop folks but many mobile users don't log in using their mobile browser and use the FB apps instead. Developer worked with us, lots of emails exchanged over the course of an hour or two, and we got that resolved by ensuring our FB page didn't have any country or age restrictions. Not only was the support timely, rapid and helpful, but keep in mind this is a free app! Can't ask for more. Would give this developer 10 stars if I could.

Does not protect from /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling as claimed, which is really supposed to be the primary feature of this app. (Many other so-called protections such as image or content copying from the site always have workarounds that can't be protected against.)

We've been using this app for 6 months, and only ever hit one issue with it, and the support on that was superb. Next day response with a working solution. Couldn't ask for more than that.

We tried several other tab app solutions before but each of them quite badly interfered with existing theme styling. (Always back up your theme before adding an app like this in case that happens so you can revert.) This one was clean, and also gave us the best options for easily customizing the look. We didn't need to resort to any CSS edits. As a bonus, no noticeable effect on load times either. Like several others, it takes product description content with a particular HTML heading tag (defaults to H4) and converts that into a tab, or an accordion if all of the tabs don't fit on a single line, which is perfect for mobile use. You can elect if the first tab is open or not automatically in an accordion view. There are a lot of good looking preset styles as a starting point and a nice UI for customizing and previewing the look to match your customized theme. What's most important for an existing established store is that by adapting an existing tag (say an H4) you can slowly introduce tabs to your product content pages and easily choose not to use it on some if desired. We found this very practical, plus it typically took seconds to a minute per product to get the look we wanted, which is great for stores with a lot of pre-existing content. You can easily have content above the first tab too. The only thing on our wish list it doesn't do is give us the ability to have content after the tabs. Once you've used the HTML tag associated with a tab, the tabs will pick up on all of the remainder of the content. It'd be nice to have another heading tag that can be used to specify where tabs end so standardized footer content can be included in a product description. That's the only thing stopping us from giving this 5 stars, and it's not a show stopper so this is a keeper for us. You can see this app in practice at The Microbrand Store. Check out some of the watches on the following link, they all have tabs implemented. The bracelet on the same link doesn't have tabs. https://microbrand.store/collections/manufaktur-waldhoff/ultramatic

Seems like a no brainer and incredibly easy to set up for non-technical folks with the provided wizard. Worked perfectly for us with our existing order template at The Microbrand Store - https://microbrand.store

We have non-breaking space HTML entity codes in our product titles at The Microbrand Store, http://the.microbrand.store, which display fine on our web store but were appearing as codes in the templates. Not only did they fix this for us, which was greatly appreciated since I imagine only a very few stores are doing this, but they did so in a fast and efficient manner, after a bit of back and forth experimentation, and during the Christmas/New Year holiday period too. Exceptional customer service! At the outset, they also stated that if the problem couldn't be resolved, we'd get a full refund. Can't speak highly enough of the team here. This is exactly what you want in team supporting a plug-in, as over time the system (Shopify) that it's running on will change, and you'll want to work with a team that is responsive if/when new bugs crop up.