UpPromote Affiliate Marketing

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

The app, unfortunately, isn't working as it should. When affiliates create a link and share it on Instagram, the Instagram browser strips out the affiliate slug at the end, leaving only the raw URL. As a result, the sales go through, but the app fails to attribute them to the correct affiliate. This leads to affiliates approaching me with concerns like, "Hey, I don’t see the sale my friend made." They then have to provide proof of purchase, which is frustrating for everyone involved.

When I reached out to support about this issue, instead of escalating it to their developers, they suggested a workaround—making every affiliate a "forever affiliate." This isn’t a solution for us. "Forever affiliate" means that once a customer buys a product through an affiliate, all future orders from that customer will always be attributed to that affiliate. This approach doesn't address the core issue, which is the app's failure to handle URL attribution properly.

Furthermore, the app doesn't allow for a straightforward payout process unless I set up PayPal in developer mode, which is more complicated than it sounds. It requires creating a business PayPal account, entering developer mode, and configuring several risky settings. It’s far from a plug-and-play experience.

The affiliate portal itself is also very basic and lacks a professional look. Given the app's $99/month price, this is quite disappointing. At most, it seems worth around $15/month. I've found a competitor app that is far more reasonably priced and doesn’t have the Instagram issue. With this app, affiliates can share custom links via Instagram DM or in their bio without the link being auto-converted.

To be honest, just because an app has lots of high-star reviews doesn't necessarily mean it's the best option. Often, those with fewer 5-star reviews perform better because they are more motivated to improve.

After my conversation with the support representative ended without a resolution and no escalation to higher support, they sent me a dancing cat GIF, which felt unprofessional and mocking. When dealing with customer service, if you can’t help a customer, sending a GIF like that is not appropriate. Management should monitor these interactions to ensure a higher quality of customer service.

They show fake referral sales/orders, Our team raised complaint with them but not received any response.

find a different one. crazy expensive

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.

Does not work and there is no access to customer service. It has been a year. 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.