ZenBox: Bundle Builder

I was so excited to finally offer build a gift box feature however this app does not work properly. The backend will often not show up, often show an error message. Most often, the backend shows "create your first builder!" screen even though I already have a builder live on my website. This is problematic because it takes forever to reload and reload and reload and try to get the builder that is LIVE to even show up on the backend in order to edit it. As of today, the live version is showing only 4 steps, but the backend (when it decides to even show the builder) shows 6 steps. There is no live chat, so I feel like there is no support regarding this. What it boils down to is that this is the app that many of us need/want, but for $20/month it is insanely expensive for an app that doesn't work properly. If there was a free or even cheaper version, you might be able to stomach these issues despite the subscription fee. But for $20/month, almost the same price as the entire Shopify subscription, I expect the app to appear in the backend, and not have discrepancies between what is LIVE on the website and what the backend shows. I would love to revisit this app eventually in the future but as of now, unfortunately $20/month is way too much for something that presents incomplete steps to my customers. I can deal with the backend not showing up and being annoying, although it shouldn't,- but now that it is showing LIVE only 4 steps to my customers, who now can't complete their gift boxes, while the backend shows 6 (when it decides to appear) there isn't even anything I can do about this and it makes my shop appear incomplete, glitchy, and therefore unprofessional.

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.