Algolia AI Search & Discovery

A few early hiccups, but the developer fixed them. Everything works great! Great communications with the developer.

Algolia is an amazing search SaaS providing an amazing user experience to our customers. We were thinking about building a search ourselves with Elasticsearch, but are now using Algolia to make 3M+ books searchable at shop.autorenwelt.de.

Matthieu, who is responsible for this integration at Algolia, was an absolute pleasure to work with - never before have I experienced such a responsive, thorough and helpful customer support.

If search is the primary way your customers interact with your product range, don't skimp on it.

Let me save everyone some time, money, and frustration and give you a summary of what to expect with this app.

The app itself works pretty good, but the company behind it is extremely suspect.

For the past 9 months we have had this app in place with their premium/unlimited plan. It cost us $65 per month every month like clockwork. Starting in August-September, all of the sudden our bill went up to $475 per month, and then again $475 in October.

When we took a closer look, it turns out there is a "bug" in the app that causes the app to trigger an event which in turn charges us money. So they have created an app that prints money for themselves.

We let them know, and all they did for us was give us a $350 coupon towards one of the months, and said they had fixed the issue. Clearly, they have not fixed the issue. We are concerned how many other customers may be the victims of fraud without knowing it.

We have made absolutely no changes to our website, yet somehow are experiencing a 9x increase in billing. Also very suspicious, this is the only third party app I have come across that does their own billing, rather than it being billed through Shopify.

Now I am having to work with Shopify to get our money back and investigate the potential fraud this company is taking part in. They are extremely slow to respond, and so far they can't even refund us the money, only give us a coupon...something is not adding up.

After reading one of the bad reviews below, I checked and found I was experiencing the same issue on my iPhone. I contacted support and they got back pretty much straight away. After 2 days of some back and forth to try to troubleshoot the problem, Matthieu has been a pleasure to work with, and helped me fixed the problem (so yes, there is a quick and easy fix for it!). They have since written a public post with the resolution https://discourse.algolia.com/t/ios-issues-with-our-shopify-autocomplete/1653

Apart from this little problem, the app itself is great, and we've been able to manipulate it to work with our retail/wholesale store. This has really helped search for both our customers and customer support team, and also makes training new employees easier. Check it out on www.smai.com.au

Thanks Matthieu and Algolia Search! Great app and great service! :)

If I could give Algolia 0 stars I would - THE WORST APP, THE WORST ORGANIZATION, DO NOT USE ALGOLIA!!!!! THEY OFFER ZERO SUPPORT - ONCE YOU ARE SIGNED UP YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. TERRIBLE

Unfortunately we were recommended this app by an old supplier and told it was easy to install and outside of the monthly fee it would not cost too much to configure. Upon installation this was in fact not true and we were quoted thousands of pounds to install the app. We then approached the app provider for help and to discuss the issues we were having. The app provider was less than helpful. We were told there was no option to end the contract early even though we have not been able to use the app so effectively we've paid for nothing with no help, support or understanding of the situation. We even suggested a breakout clause paying half of the yearly fee etc. but there was absolutely no flexibility or understanding from the app provider. This has had a huge impact on a growing small business like ours. As a result we would not recommend this app to anyone as ultimately the service for the amount you pay is not there.

Really wanted to use this app, but I cannot create an account with them. I literally cannot press the "create account" button on my browsers (and I've tried all of them).

I've asked support to help me multiple times, and they always say they will look into it, but then I never hear from them again.

EDIT: they contacted me quickly after this review with a great solution and some extra's.

This Algolia integration was easy to implement and provided a much better result that out of the box search. We've also been able to adjust the ranking and disable typo-tolerance for a few unique strings to better suit our needs.

We tested almost every search app out there and spent countless hours finding the right search for our shopify store, robotvacuums.com. We also ported it to another site, freedomusasales.com
Algolia is not only better than all search engines, it completely blows all other apps out of the game.
I cannot understand any of the low reviews except A: Lazy ignorant people who do not understand what they are missing out on or B: Jealous competitors who know their goose is cooked.
Other search apps are just modifications of the built in shopify search, which is extremely lacking in features. Some are so backwards that you cannot even type a search term in middle of a sentence, it will not show results.
We are still new to algolia and learning how to harness it but seeing the bad reviews is so categorically false and wrong on so many levels that it just gets me angry and we had to write something...
Thanks!

Good customer support
The search page is pretty fast!
It's going to be the main structure of my collections pages