Shopify Collabs

Updating my review after exploring other paid apps and using other services. I left my initial review below and had initially given this app 1 star. I'm giving this 4 stars now, as the main issue we have is sometimes our ambassadors aren't able to connect easily to the app. This usually happens when their social media (Instagram) is a secondary one, associated to their main account (as most of our ambassadors are pet accounts, we have a few of those). This is an ongoing issue, and it would be great to have this looked at better. The other issues I mentioned previously aren't great, but guess what, very expensive apps have that too, and they don't give you a manual solution to remove the commission when your own ambassadors use their code. Shopify Collabs gives you control of that, which turns out to be great. Overall I think it's a great free app, and actually is less frustrating that paid ones. I never deleted this app as I intended initially, and I'm glad I haven't. Support could be faster though. --- my 1st review: --
Not great support, takes a very long time to speak to developers when you have an issue, and still they aren't able to assist. Issues with affiliates trying to connect their social media when they have sub accounts on Instagram, and the app doesn't allow for that. Affiliates are able to use their own codes for purchases, it doesn't recognise their email addresses. Don't recommend, will be changing ASAP

I love that the app is free and works well at tracking conversions as well as syncs up with ReCharge, our subscription app for recurring purchases/commissions. They've made some necessary updates already too which I love. I hope these can be next on the list as these are a few feature requests we need:
#1 - The ability for us to edit the promo code of our affiliate after they've been accepted if someone wants to change theirs. Right now there's no way for us to do that and it's super annoying.
#2 - The ability to ADD a purchase as a conversion to an affiliate's account. Right now there's no way to do that and having a manual option would be great since we know some conversions are coming from a specific affiliate based on the customer including their name in their application.
#3 - Being able to email our affiliate directly from the dashboard! My only option at the moment is to see if I can set up automation so I can do this on autopilot with my ESP.
#4 - The ability for us to upload and provide assets to our affiliates as a content hub if you will of the different sales/promotions/products we have that they can then use to promote our products.

Providing a very easy platform by which to provide products and/or discounts to people with special codes that can tie back to sales is an A+ 5 star experience. A couple of clicks and all automated payment is all you can ask for.

However, there is no visibility into post gifting even though you have all their info. There's no analytics. There's no backend. There's no feedback.

I should be able to click on their profile and see if they've posted anything related to my product.
I should be able to message people or even send email campaigns and promotions to all my ambassadors or subsets of them.
I should be able to rate people so that other brands can see who follows through and who drives sales.

I would be surprised if even 10% of the people actually post content. It also does not drive sales. I may get 1 sale for every 3 gifts. It is absolutely of no direct value economically.

But I do get some good content from here, and it's much easier than having to deal with endless instagram requests for products. But Shopify could make this infinitely more value almost immediately with very little effort.

The app is a good way to get started with affiliate campaigns but I can't figure out a way to pause applicants. We have enough collaborators for now but they keep applying. If we remove our brand from the collabs network, the app tells us that existing affiliate links will be broken.

Overall, we like the app, it's easy to use, and largely automates the management of influencers. We'll probably move from our existing Affiliate platform at some point, but would like a few more features first, most obviously, the ability to change the email template that goes out to applicants. We have to re-write it every time, and it 'feels' like there's an option somewhere to change the template, but we've not been able to find it.

I'll give Dovetale four stars because it is now included with our Shopify subscription. We have abandoned our other provider and are fully operating on Dovetale now. However, we are feeling a lack of features and some of our affiliates have problems connecting their social accounts. Here are our suggestions, Dovetale:
-We need to be able to message influencers from the app
-Not all influencers are social media influencers. We would like the ability for people to sign up with an email address instead of a social account
-We need to pay commissions 'fixed amount per product' and that option is not available

Four stars, because in theory, this is a great app. But there is some important functionality/information that is just not clear - happy to update rating if Shopify can help with deeper understanding.

- can you outreach a creator directly from within the recruit tab? We can locate the creators we want to work with, add them to favorites, but there's no way to outreach them other then via an email list upload?? Something is missing.
- what are the sharing requirements for creators - for example, do they just get a link that can be shared in link.bio, or are there other ways that they can share their link? Need more clarification on this.
- What is the difference between members and affiliates?

Very hopeful for this app!

Great, easy installation app but room for improvement.

Really great way to get afiliates working, could use a few Quality-of-life improvements however.

First on the free products gifts, it would be great to be able to specify a collection rather than just specific products, the ability to choose how many of those are free is great but it would help if you could also choose a whole collection.

A resources page for collaborators.
a simple space for collaborators to download simple images to place on their store, logos, and the like, bonus points if you can create an image generator with the collaborator's code / link.

Edit: I would also love an automated gift system. I.e. is a collaborator makes x number of sales or y amount of sales value, they could either get a free gift or an upgrade in their status. Having this clearly shown on the page will really incentivize collaborators to do so.

I only wish you could directly reach out to affiliates via collabs through the discover feature. It would be great if there was a way to email or msg them.

Support got back to me and answered all of my questions. From their answer, Dovetale isn't as functional as UpPromote, but a lot of Dovetale's features seem cleaner, more intuitive and Dovetale is free. Not sure if I'll be making the switch yet, but manual referral entry isn't possible, so it's likely I'll have to pass on Dovetale until that feature is possible.