Findlay Hats

The product itself would earn 4 stars from us. Onboarding was smooth, our account manager was helpful throughout, and the app is easy to set up and run. Two things to know before installing. First, affiliate marketing attracts fraud, and this app has no real playbook for it. We dealt with more scammers and bad-faith users than genuine customers who wanted to share the brand. Overseas coupon abusers, people gaming referral links, a major uptick in stolen credit cards being used to get referral sales for commission, and constant backend cleanup. We eventually figured out how to limit it ourselves to some degree, but the tooling and guidance were thin, and after running the numbers, the program cost us more than it brought in. That is partly the nature of affiliate marketing, and don't blame SS at all, but go in with eyes open. Second, and this is why the review is 2 stars: the offboarding process. When you uninstall, Social Snowball permanently deletes ALL of your data within 24 hours. Every affiliate record, every commission balance, everything. While I understand there is compliance requirements with Shopify, there is no warning during uninstall. No pop-up, no banner, no dedicated email, no option to export your data first. Zero effort in helping avoid this problem or helping your customers. Due to shipping times, we pay affiliates after orders are delivered (around 30 days for us), so we canceled expecting to log in and send final payments like any normal app billing cycle wind-down. Instead, everything was gone. We now cannot tell who we owe or how much. There is no process native to Shopify to track which affiliate is tied to what discount code. Support from both platforms confirmed there is no recovery and no workaround and Social Snowball did not take the issue very seriously. Absolutely feels like the second we unsubscribed, we were a nuisance and just annoying them with pretty basic requests, trying to simply pay our affiliates. If you ever plan to leave, export everything and pay every affiliate to zero BEFORE you uninstall. Nobody will warn you, so this review is the warning.

Best subscription app, been using for years. Great CS, easy to use, 10/10 thank you!

Original Review: 4 Stars Vela is great for quickly uploading new products. We do weekly drops and this has made life way easier. Really happy we made the switch. Knocked off one star because one feature was missing that is crucial to our workflow: the ability to schedule product launches. At the time, this added an extra multi-step process to every drop. Support said scheduling was coming soon, and once added, I planned to update my review to 5 stars. Updated Review: 2 Stars After using the new scheduling feature for three weeks, we experienced enough issues with support to lower this to 2 stars. Vela still helps speed up product creation, and when it works, the time savings are real. But the scheduling and profile systems caused real problems for our team. Support consistently pointed to user error, even when the workflows were unclear or lacked basic safeguards. Week 1: Products posted at $0.00 We scheduled a product launch using the new feature. Items did not go live on time, and when they finally did, the prices were set to $0.00. We accidentally sold over 40 items for free before catching the issue. Support said this happened because our shop had not been refreshed recently. During the drop, they then auto-refreshed the shop, which temporarily locked us out of the system while customers were live on our site. Week 2: Quantities zeroed out Even with the shop fully synced, the next drop still had problems. Items went live a few minutes late, and this time the inventory for each product was set to zero. Everything appeared sold out until we manually re-added the correct quantities while the drop was active. Week 3 – Listings deleted after canceling schedule After the first two weeks, we had decided to avoid using scheduling altogether. However, one of our employees accidentally scheduled 20 new items. I followed the chatbot’s instructions to cancel the scheduled listings, assuming they would return to draft status. Instead, 18 out of 20 listings were deleted entirely with no warning or fallback. When I reached out to support, they explained: “Since I assume these were newly created listings there was no status to save them in after canceling the publication. So when it goes direct from new listing -> scheduled there is no fallback to draft.” They also told me: “You scheduled multiple different operations to take place at the exact same time or within a couple minutes of each other, which as I've explained is NOT allowed.” Apparently, the correct method is to use one bulk publish operation, rather than scheduling items individually. That may be technically correct, but none of this was clear in the UI. There was no warning, no explanation at the time, and no way to recover the work once the mistake was made. Rather than acknowledging that the system might need a confirmation prompt or better guidance, support placed the blame entirely on how we were using it. Prior issue: Profiles overwriting live listings A few months earlier, we had another issue that also impacted our rating. I made some small formatting edits to a product profile, expecting those changes to apply only to future listings. Instead, those changes were immediately applied to over 80 existing live products. Product descriptions were replaced, photos were removed, and unique listing details were wiped out with no warning. Because we only use Vela for creating new product listings, not for editing existing live ones, this came as a complete surprise. There was no clear indication that editing a profile would push changes to live products, and no option to preview or undo. When we brought it up, support explained: “When you apply a profile, whatever attributes are included in that profile are applied to the listings connected to the profile as expected.” They added: “You should only include attributes in the profile that you want to unify and have applied across all the connected listings.” “This is working as intended.” That may be true from a technical standpoint, but in practice it led to serious problems. Our use case was basically dismissed, and the damage to our listings took hours to fix. A confirmation screen or clearer labeling would have prevented the issue entirely. Summary: Vela is a helpful tool in a lot of ways. It has sped up our workflow when creating new products, and the base functionality is solid. But both the scheduling system and profile editor are easy to misuse, and the consequences can be irreversible. Support may be technically correct in how the platform is designed, but that does not mean it is intuitive or safe to use without deeper training. Whether these problems were user error or not, the product did not do enough to prevent them. We hope to see improvements and would be happy to update this review if changes are made.

Best page building app on Shopify, use on both of our websites + always recommend to friends to use this app for page building.

Second week in 3 weeks where the app just stops working right before a product drop. We relyu on this app to show how many products are in stock, and we are super dissapointed that this has now happened twice. Great concept, has worked okay for years, but it is time to uninstall and find something more reliable.

Installed years ago, it works well with minimal input on our end. Does what we want it to do and we are happy with it.

Update #2: Brought my review back down to a 2 star review. Their customer service has been great to deal with, and I am very grateful for them. They bring an otherwise 1 star review up to 2. However, the app constantly is still having problems, such as showing items that are supposed to be hidden, failing to show any text in the boxes, making major changes to the layout like adding 5+ extra rows of suggestions without anything being done on our end. The app has been the most inconsistent app we have used on shopify and likely will be switching to another alternative as a result. Update #1: Customer service was very fast, friendly & easy to deal with. While the problem is still not fully understood, we reached a positive conclusion and the app is back up and running. Still removing 1 star due to the error that cost my business a month of missed targeted recommendations without notifying me, but overall happy with the app and how they handled this problem. Original Review: Once installed and running fine, at some point this app simply disconnected from our store, without notifying us. This is the second time this app has stopped working and disconnected without notifying me. For an app that is an important part of our sales funnel, I expect to be notified the instant it becomes inactive, so we can fix it and get it back up and running. Zero notifications of this is unacceptable. The first time it was due to a price change and ceased to work due to needing to confirm a new price point. This is understandable, but I was not made aware that this was going on, and had to fix it 100% on my end. I contacted a customer success wizard who said they would "make sure that this will be done more clearly in the future" but this was not the case today. The current time I am still waiting to hear back from customer support as to why my recommendations are no longer showing up, and trying to fix it on my end.

Love the concept of the app, but fairly frustrated with the customer support and troubleshooting thus far. Pros: The Concept & Easy to set up. Cons: Zero troubleshooting, no customer support over the weekend We have had 2 major hurdles with our app since starting it earlier this week. We reached out on Thursday evening for help with an issue and had moderate help throughout the day via chat on Friday, but the issue was not solved, and we were told we had to wait until Monday for this issue to be fixed when another rep would be back who could better assist me. Not a major issue, but still frustrating. The second issue seems to be a glitch in the app or something wrong with how we set it up for our VIP Tiers, not sure. This is causing our customers to not show up higher than the lowest tier, regardless of qualifiers achieved. We reached out on Friday for help, but their customer service was gone for the weekend, including the email listed for urgent requests. I handle a lot of apps, from a lot of developers and usually can find the solution to problems like this fairly quickly. However, the smile backend has zero troubleshooting help that I can find for this issue. It has very clear and defined info on how to set something up, but zero guides on how to troubleshoot any problems that arise. I understand people don't want to work weekends, but for an app of this size, and this importance, I feel this is inexcusable. The internet never closes and having an app that literally requires direct customer engagement and involvement like this needs a support team that can help every day of the week. Regardless of the lack of support over the weekend, there is still a huge problem with no troubleshooting help, and it confuses me an app of this size can care so little for helping their customers through problems. Give us the power to solve problems ourselves if you aren't going to have a weekend shift. We announced our rewards & VIP program, then immediately got hit with customer service questions from our customers who are angry, confused or frustrated that their VIP tiers are not showing up correctly. So our customers who were most excited to take advantage of this program, are getting an introduction to our rewards program in a negative way. This simple error here has lead to a pileup of work for us, frustrated customers and a steady 5+ hours of work on my end within the app trying to fix it alone. I imagine my problem here is not that complicated to fix, but I am at a standstill. Not a great start to an app we were excited about. Lesson learned though, we should never launch a new app like this prior to the weekend if they don't have 7 days a week customer support. Update: Raised review to 3 stars after being reached out to about this issue on Monday. Update2: Back down to 2 stars. It does the basics, and we will continue to use it due to not having the time to set up a new plan on another platform until after the holidays. I have 3 new issues to share here. Issue 1: VIP Program. We downgraded to the free plan because the VIP program did not go as intended. From the beginning, it simply was not clearly defined and caused a lot of confusion. As a result, I was having trouble getting people set up in the appropriate VIP tiers for past purchases, and I followed some advice from their CS team to temporarily change from a dollars VIP program to a points VIP program. I was not informed, nor smart enough to notice, that in doing so there are no safeguards in place to stop you from rewarding hundreds of customers with thousands of dollars in free merchandise. As suggested, we changed to a point system temporarily to see if that would help get people to the proper tier, and due to the ratio of dollars to points being way off (1000 points is wayyyy easier to get then $1000 spent) hundreds of customers automatically qualified for our top tier VIP program without actually spending the money to do so. We made a huge mistake and had to cancel the program altogether - in addition we then had to honor many free gifts for our customers due to the mistake, and offer alternative prizes to those who qualified for a tier we simply couldn't afford to do (multiple people who $100+ value in products). This was largely my mistake, not theirs, but a simple warning somewhere along the way mentioning that the dollars to points ratio does not change automatically when you change the VIP qualifiers would have saved a major headache. Such a situation should have a warning in place prior to rewarding hundreds of people. Issue 2: Referrals. We have free stickers on our website as a great first touch for new customers. However, the referrals program will still work for people who are referred to our website, but end up just purchasing free stickers, and nothing of value. Despite the "this coupon only works if the customer spends $X or more" the referrer still gets the referral bonus regardless of amount spent. Not an issue for companies that don't have free products on their site, but a major issue for us. We do have a note on our FAQ page that notes a referral where the customer spends under $10 will be automatically removed and then we manually remove any of these referrals on the back end. Seems like this would be an easy fix, but when confronted about it Smile was unable to help us. Issue 3: Integration at the free level. The lack of any integration with the free plan is frustrating, especially when we want to simply integrate it with our customer service platform. As a result, any customer service related issues in regard to this app (a daily thing) have to be manually adjusted in the app itself, instead of the customer service app ticket. I do not want to upgrade to the $100+ a month just to integrate this app into our customer service app. Alrighty, I am done rambling. Hope this helps.

Free app worked fine. However, we did not want to upgrade and just now uninstalled due to an overaggressive sales representative. They reached out to see if we would be interested in upgrading, we kindly declined. They kept emailing us. We declined 3 more times, and they just kept coming. Not just via email, but phone as well. I understand persistence is important, but this much contact about something we have explicitly said we are not interested in, multiple times, is very frustrating. Edit: Let's add a linkedin sales pitch to this complaint. Email, phone and now linkedin, all after 4+ friendly declines. Edit 2: Was given a cocky response via Linkedin: "haha without even knowing what I was going to ask, but I get it you probably get alot of these sales emails lol" HE FORGOT he has already reached out via email and phone with the exact same offer and proposal. This guy is just carpet bombing customers and I do not appreciate being harassed with a sales pitch after a friendly no, numerous times.

Wow. We had this app installed for 3 minutes before we realized it was automatically live on the website, prior to getting ANY of our Swatches updated, it was showing up on our product pages with only about 1/5th of what was needed. Considering we just launched a new line of products today, and our website had a high amount of traffic for us, who were now on a website that did not give them the proper selection of variants. Had they had a simple "test mode" none of this would have been an issue...and if they do, in my frantic struggle through the admin panel, settings, swatches etc did not turn this up, so there is a user experience failure there as I was unable to find a very basic button. Overall, this short frustrating experience has convinced me to avoid Webyze at all cost.

Works great, wish there was a flat fee for use on all forms, instead of cost for all different forms.