flareAI: SEO Apps & Sales , 72 reviews
Refine
-
By rating
My experience with Flair began promisingly four months ago. The impact wasn't monumental, yet the functionality was discernible, providing an initially satisfactory user experience. However, the trajectory took a negative turn from there, leading to concerns worth sharing.
Flair requested an in-app star rating, to which I readily gave five stars, given the initial efficacy of the product. However, a few days later, a surprise awaited me in my inbox. A Flair representative emailed me, offering a month's free usage in exchange for a 5-star review on the Shopify app store. They even went as far as to provide a review draft which stated, "FlareAI has amplified our store's Google presence from 40 to 551 products, leading to a noticeable increase in organic sales and traffic."
Now, to clarify a glaring discrepancy: my store's inventory consists of a mere six products, a far cry from the 551 figure quoted in the drafted review. This discrepancy indicates that other reviews on this page using the same script may be founded on falsehoods, significantly undermining the credibility of their testimonies.
But it doesn't stop there. The offer of a "free month" triggered a realization that Flair had been charging me without my explicit awareness. Yes, I had approved a Shopify page, but it was presented as a requirement for the one-time fee they also mentioned. Subsequently, I discovered that they had been subtly billing me between $15 to $29 monthly, a fact I was oblivious to until now.
Digging deeper, I discovered a somewhat concealed detail: Flair charges based on "sales attributable to FlairAI." In simpler terms, they levy a 1% fee per order if the customer navigates to the store via Google or other search engines, which happens to be a majority of the time. This model of operation is murky at best and poses serious questions about their business ethics.
Regardless of how they respond to this review, the inconsistencies in their communication and dubious charging practices speak volumes. Their responses are often templated and involve grossly inflated figures. I strongly urge potential users to consider these factors before engaging with this application.
This is Jessica from the flareAI team. Appreciate you taking the time and effort to feedback, we are listening to customers’ feedback whether it is good or where we fall short. Here are my point-by-point responses:
1. Store URLs
Yes, your store contains 16 products. But where flareAI helps you grow your organic presence is by optimizing for currency-language URLs. As you notice, you are offering your product pages with various currency-language options. flareAI submits your store's products, pages, blogs, and collections, including all currency-language URLs. So in total, it is 705 URLs. Out of these 705 URLs, when you added flareAI, only 40 URLs were found. As on May 10, 2023 flareAI has helped your store to get 569 URLs found on Google.
2. Your initial 5-star review on flareAI Dashboard:
flareAI recommendation engine automatically sends a written 5-star review request to those who clicked on a 5-star rating on the flareAI dashboard. As a store owner, you know how important reviews are. It's common for users to give 1-star ratings, obtaining 5-star reviews can be more challenging but immensely valuable to our app's success. Plus! We are thankful to those who spend their valuable time sharing their experience with flareAI. It is similar to you as a Shopify merchant offering coupons and discounts to your customers :-)
3. Billing Approval Page
We have mentioned in detail your store's billing components in the App approval page while you added flareAI. It is possible you have missed reading it. We replied to your email regarding the billing query on April 22, 2023.
Appreciate your time and feedback, hope this clarifies
Jessica
Have found the app makes up charges and allocates fake sales to charge commission on. Says no more than $29.99 will be charged in a month but then adds some sales to charge higher fees. Save the hassle and submit your site via Google search console and bing webmaster tools.
This is Jessica from the flareAI team. flareAI has never charged you more than the agreed amount of $29.99 in a billing period. I have provided clear details below, and have also included clear attributions to show how the sales are generated from Google Search, using the data from Shopify and Google Analytics.
I have also emailed you more specific details. Appreciate your time and feedback, hope this clarifies.
-Jessica
### SPECIFIC DETAILS ###
To clarify, the monthly billing components as per your plan as explained in App Approval page:
1. Monthly Resource Charge: To cover the cost of storage, processing, and submission of resources. Starts at $19.99
2. Sales Performance Incentive: flareAI worked to get a product newly found on a free sales channel, say Google Search. The product then received an order from this channel. flareAI earns 1% of the order total.
Example of order attributed to flareAI.
> https://www.db2u.co.uk/products/luxury-crushed-velvet-sleigh-frame-bed was not previously found on Google. flareAI submitted this URL to Google on August 01, 2022. Google indexed the URL on August 02, 2022. Order# XXX2921 was received on March 03, 2023, attributable to flareAI. This information is also available in your flareAI POP report
3. Being a Shopify Partner, flareAI won’t be able to charge you more than the approved amount of $29.99. However, the billing cycle for Shopify and Shopify apps is different. The app billing cycle will start from the day when you installed the app. As your Shopify billing period is different, charges created in different flareAI billing cycles can appear in your Shopify billing.
Timeline of your last 3 flareAI billing cycle:
A. Mar 31 - Apr 29, 2023: flareAI has charged you $26.91 in this period
B. Apr 30- May 30, 2023: flareAI has charged you $29.08 in this period
C. You are currently in this billing period: May 31- June 29, 2023. As of 15-June-2023, $19.99 is charged.
Appreciate your time and feedback, hope this clarifies
Jessica
Bogus App i dont think it works at all. i have loads of apps downloaded on my store and i keep getting this message below??
Store is not compatible with flareAI Free Sales Channels. Common reasons are:
* Password protected store
* Trial store
* No primary domain ie store is pointing to .myshopify.com
* Other flareAI incompatibilities
Aborting flareAI installation...
Jessica here from the flareAI team. Your domain is created in 2020, but you do not have enough sales history for flareAI’s algorithm to train using AI/ML techniques. That is the reason your store was marked as ineligible.
Appreciate your time and feedback, hope this clarifies
Jessica
WOW, I'm suddenly getting charged $200 usage fees for no reason. No way that 1% of sales you are kidding me here. Are you scamming people here? Good job you successfully scammed me. I'm calling my bank for fraud charges if you don't refund me.
Hi Anni, We have emailed you screenshots of the billing approved by you during the add app, but I want to respond here as well. Your store has a very large number of URLs 121,110. The pricing is due to the cost for us to process a large number of URLs. On 12/1/22 you added the app but requested a discount. Our product manager had extended a 3-month discount and informed you by email. In a few months, flareAI helped get 1672 URLs newly found on Google. In the month of March 2022, the coupon expired and Shopify's billing system charged the full price.
Please note, all the charges are directly billed by Shopify (not us), and they will never bill more than the merchant’s pre-approved amount.
Hope this clarifies.
Jessica
Update: This app has less than 2 weeks to prove it's of some use before I delete it. They said they doubled my found on google score but I'm only getting 1-2 visitors a day, IF THAT! And half of them are from countries I don't even ship to. And no, I haven't received any sales. I would give it more time if I was at least breaking even each month.
This app charges you way more than they say! The description says you only pay them 1% of their sales. I haven't received any sales from them but yet I have over $20 being charged to my account. Also be wary of the 5-star reviews you read, as they're giving people a free month in exchange for a good review. Their instant messaging doesn't work, and they don't respond to emails. Hopefully, you heed my warning.
Our apologies, your message of 21-Nov-22 was found in the spam folder. We have since reviewed your request and are emailing you a response today.
In 51 days since adding flareAI, your Found-on-Google has grown from 40% to 77%. With unique quality product descriptions, nice images, and compelling offers every product newly found on Google potentially adds to the revenue.
We have emailed you screenshots of the app listing and approval pages showing the app pricing. Our apologies that it was not clear to you.
I am sorry you believe the 5-star reviews we have received are fake. At flareAI, like others in the Shopify Apps community, we work very hard to ensure our client's success.
As a store owner, you will recognize that human nature is to go out of their way to give a 1-star review if a customer is even remotely unhappy. But it is hard for any store or app owner to ask customers to make time to provide a 5-star review. So we thank our happy customers for taking the time.
Almost on a daily basis, my team receives unsolicited emails from companies and individuals claiming to own 100s of Shopify stores and offering us “good” reviews. It would be against our company mission and individual conscience to accept this kind of fake review.
We appreciate your understanding.
Jessica M
Austin, TX, United States
I don't think this actually does any work. They only charge . Only when I was running google ads the visitors shot up and Flare claimed and charged us for it. Now after stopping Google ads hardly any visitors so I really don't think this app is good for me.
Hi Varoon, Greetings from your team at flareAI. flareAI has helped your store increase Found on Google to 666+ URLs. We emailed you on December 16, 2022 with this information. While flareAI works to get your right products found on Google, sometimes the traffic growth is there but customers don't buy it because of pricing, or store design issues or service issues. Thank you for taking the time. - Jessica
do you not trust these people it's a complete scam. It's a complete lie is very well decorated but you have no control at all. You don't know what's really going on. It says it puts us in on these platforms but you don't even connect to them I Thomas in a hardship situation and they said if I put a good review they were going to give me a month free of service, but they couldn't even do that. They told me to give them user permissions to help me work on their products which caused Google to suspend my account again you have no control at all what's going on and they respond quickly but it's all lies When I give them permission to fix the store they have done nothing for the last four days and they keep telling me to connect me to the store which they already are. You're dealing with automated robot. That's the problem they're not real people it's all generic do not trust these people. It is a scam. Stay away they get your hopes up for failure lead you down the wrong path do not use hope as a guide on e-commerce you have to use data and fax in order to get results. Again, beware stop do not use this program.
Hi George, You have 21 apps, because you said you were legally blind, we thought we would go out of our way to help you with your suspension issue with GMC, even though our app or team has nothing to do with the feed or the suspension. Hope you understand. Take care. - Jessica
Its fake app
In my experience, I did not find the FlareAI app to be useful, and I would not recommend it. I believe that it's better to use Google Merchant to manage your organic traffic. While using the app, I had some concerns about its value, and when I asked the customer support team about it, I didn't receive a satisfactory answer. One person Jessica M answered with vague responses. I also noticed some fake reviews on the app's site, which raised doubts about its credibility. If you're considering using this app, I recommend doing some research and trying it out before investing your money. Personally, I was not satisfied with the results, and I'm currently seeking a refund.
Seriously you are fighting on useless service you just want to take people's money by providing no service so unethical thanks for putting my website in generic I might get more links from here as compared to your tool appreciate it. the reason people use you because they are new and all these fake review will not take you so far instead of fighting on review try to improve your service FOG score is useless your own score I have the screen shot for the same.
Updates they keep mentioning why you sent 13 email and we responded since they are not able to answer same question even after 13 emails. I am more than happy to put the email for public consumption.
they reached out to me and offered to refund the money if I take down this review @shopify support are you listening? Please let me know if I can send you the email.
I said I will not do that it's not ethical. I simply asked them to accept mistake and apologies. But it seems really rude people , I am going to complain about this service to FTC every one who lost money should do the same if Shopify does not listen then FTC will investigate the fraud they are doing. they are trying to get money from the free traffic that every smb owners should get PLEASE DONT INSTALL THIS APP
Do yourself a favor please don't use this service totally useless waste of time. just search on google you will see a lot of bad practice
Hi Rahul at https://indiashopping.io MP, India 452001. This is Jessica from flareAI team, Austin, TX. It is sad, you installed our SEO app for 8 days, sent 13 service requests, each of which we responded to within 1 business day, and now you rated us 1-star. Here's why we believe the rating is not reasonable:
1. You created an indiashopping.io very recently on 3-Mar-23
2. You added App on 15-Apr-23, today is 23-Apr-23. You emailed us 13 times in 8 days, and each time we responded with clarity, honesty, and politeness.
3. Even so, in 8 days your Found on Google score has increased from 3% to over 80+% in 8 days.
4. You are using another app for GMC, and needed help with fixing an issue with Manufacturer Part Number. As a courtesy, our team did help you with a suggestion to fix the issue at no charge.
It is as if you wanted to give us a 1-star anyways.
Jessica
Sorry that you were upset and gave us a review after just a few seconds of install/uninstall. Your store did not qualify as it does not have enough sales history to benefit from flareAI. Hope this clarifies