ZenBox: Bundle Builder

I test a lot of shopify apps and 95% of the time I face the same problem. We merchants are on earth battling real problems and app developers are somewhere in the moon or a paradise where the sun always shine and the world is perfect in their imagination of how a e-commerce businesses work as they are not merchants but app developers.

This app has the potential to become a great app but it is not because it lacks important details, details the developers would understand if they would have themselves an ecommerce business and had to deal with how logistics processes and 3PL warehouses work as well as what bundles really should be.

Let’s start with the PROs:

- It features some kind of simple conditional logic and that is something you will hardly find in other apps, we really need something like this, that is why we invested some time testing this app.

- You can create several steps so that customers go from one step to the next in the process of choosing their products. Im sure there are more Pros but nothing really special beside that.

The CONs:

- Buggy, it started to do estrange things with products, showing them as not being in stock when they really were and things like that. We do not know if that is something punctual and the app behaves so in certain scenarios or it is really as buggy as other users have reported here.

- Yes when you click in a product when creating the bundle it opens the product in a pop up to see a bigger picture and the description but it does not link to the original product, which is really what it should do because there is no point of having pop ups showing just a part of that product.

- When the customer adds a product to the bundle, on the listing on the right, they add the title of product in text but without a small picture of the product which but more than two or three products looks not clear.

- The design lacks the most basic UX principles, problem you will find in 95% of all Shopify Apps. Most apps show horrible design results on our beautiful themes and this one is unfortunately not different in that respect.

- The conditional logic does not differentiate if the customer adds one unit of one product or 5 units of that same product and for us that is crucial. When we asked them if they could add that feature (A feature we found reasonable and easy to implement) they answer very correctly and kindly saying that they wouldn’t do it now. They didn’t even say, well let’s talk about it and maybe we can find a solution, it was a simple NO. I thought well I could do a workaround creating product bundles with more than one of the same product in that bundle and add that bundle as a product in the bundle.

- But all that is useless if you need to deal with stock control and real logistics since this app adds your bundle in the cart as a single product with a list in text underneath of the products contain in that bundle, if they selves would be merchants they would know the lack of inventory control makes their app pretty useless for most users selling hundreds or thousands of products and having to control their inventories or their 3PL warehouses.

In a nutshell an app with great potential because of its conditional logic approach but their developers needs someone who understands about inventory control, UX principles, how important is to implement a real conditional logic and make this app stable and bug free because there is nothing worse than having to rely on an app which you cannot really rely on.

We will take a look at this app in a few months, maybe the developers make an effort to really improve this app in that they go out of their developers boxes and take a look at how ecommerce works in the real world.