Wine Dispensary

We've been using this for a few over a year now. This has been effective at engaging customers and answering questions. We've had at least 100 conversations (a meaningful number for our store), and the app has worked well. However, after a full year, we wish there was more progress towards integration with additional apps and experiences. Why is it that every messenger app the world over can have an App ecosystem, and Shopify HAS an app ecosystem, and yet, we can't access customer Messenger (Shopify's own SMS and Email app), or Subscriptions (also a Shopify App), or Flow (for automated emails and other customer-specific actions), etc. The lack of progress on features is astounding and shows the lack of vision and ingenuity of the current powers that be at this company. I wish they would use their new-found AI prowess to start accelerating customer engagement feature integration within their own native ecosystem of apps and services.

It's frustrating that Shopify Subscriptions doesn't offer better in-app analytics and subscription management. Key use cases that are missing for us include by-store (physical retail) subscription pickup reporting. Each store struggles to review how by-store subscription pickups will happen in any given period. Additionally, there is little in the way of notification functionality to let us know when a new customers subscribes or cancels. We have to monitor this ourselves. Frankly, I believe this app could be so much more functional if Shopify would invest more in it's own app ecosystem instead of allowing third parties to milk Shopify Pro customers like us for every dollar just to implement a reasonable Wine Club (our store's use case).

Really good on the email side. We send ~40k+ emails with ~40% open rates. We'd love to see better editing tools and more modern templates (Canva integration?!). Otherwise pretty great app. Five(ish) out of five stars. Except, we discovered that SMS isn't viable for any of our product or event marketing. Not because of the content (we advertise cheese tastings in-store, for instance). It's because our name includes one of their prohibited terms. That's ridiculous for this era of content moderation tools.. For instance, our name is Wine Dispensary and because our name contains the word wine and the word dispensary, we cannot send ANY marketing content via SMS.