Launchpad

Scheduling campaigns and releases is a feature relevant to any merchant. Writing this from the perspective of a shop owner that currently works solo and physically cannot be present every weekend to update important details, as much as I'd like to. I'm part of Shopify's demographic for which Shopify Plus is prohibitively expensive. I'll continue my hunt for options, but I would've loved to have used a native tool like this. The features advertised by this app should be available to all merchants by default.

Bottom line - If you are selling over 25 products and you're using BOLD's Product Discount - KEEP IT until Shopify develops this further!

We switched over to Shopify Plus and were told that this would work in place of BOLD's Product Discount. Sadly, the part of Launchpad that does what Bold's Product Discount used to do for us is extremely underdeveloped. There are SO MANY things that it can not do when compared to Product Discount when it comes to running a sale. And I am writing this review to prepare you, and to hopefully prevent you from having the same experience I just had before the biggest shopping week of the year - especially if you are familiar with BOLD's Product Discount.

We have a store with over 400 items. Our collections are built for organization (so it makes sense to the customer) based on the type of product. The price can be from say $8 to $140 in that one collection. Launchpad will not let you select a collection for your sale (or what they call an "event") and then customize the sale prices on the individual products in that collection. So I can't select my 80 products, and tweak maybe 10 of them. It will only let you do a blanket percentage off over the whole collection. So unless I want to make everything in that collection a flat 25% off, you have to go in one by one and hand select all of the products.

For us, that meant 400 products had to have a box checked one by one by one to be able to customize the prices. Your other option is to go in and build all new collections to divide up the 400 products, categorizing them by the percent you want to discount them just for the sale so that you can blanket discount them by percentage.

After changing each and every price of my 400 items, I saved it. Over half of the products didn't save. I went back in one by one to fix my 200 items that didn't save. Saved again. Then the first 8 or so of the 200 I had re-done had saved, the rest didn't. So then I had to start working ten at a time and saving. Ten more, then saving, ten more then saving. It ended up taking me 3 days to do this whole process - I ended up building about 4 custom collections, and then it was just easier to hand click.

In Product Discount, it takes me roughly 3 hours to set up a sale from scratch because it lets me segment my sale, select my collection, and then customize within. Also, there I could just turn an old sale back on by updating the date. That took me like 20 minutes to add my new releases (since the last sale) and then click some toggles - I was done in 30 minutes. I would download the data and hand it to my team for marketing materials. Done.

Back to Launchpad - once you do all that work, there's no way to download the data. I have a team that I need to give this information to so that they can build our marketing material for our big sale - facebook ads, signs, fliers, bloggers, magazines, email marketing, and the only way for me to get a list of the products with the original price, new price, and percentage off, is to open an excel spreadsheet beside my Launchpad window and one by one of my 400 items, enter the data. (I feel like this would take a developer maybe 30 minutes to fix or change, but who knows, I'm not a developer)

There is not a way to customize the look of the products when they go on sale (choosing an icon that goes on the corner of your product when it goes on sale). I always enjoyed doing that on Product Discount.

There's no way to preview your sale.

The sale starts, and something isn't right with one of my products, now what? I mentioned that when using Product Discount, I was able to segment my sale into groups of items (I just used our regular collections), pull the items in by collection, and then customize any individual products sale price. This way when I ran a sale, if something wasn't right, I could quickly turn that section off, edit it, and turn it back on. In Launchpad, it won't let you segment or run multiple "events" at the same time. And once the sale goes live, I'm not sure if you can turn it off or touch anything to tweak something, and then turn it back on.

And my last hope and dream is that it saves this "event" so I can use it in the future without having to do all the work of pulling in our products one by one. There's no way to duplicate an event :( As far as I'm aware of, I can't duplicate it to build it into another sale event for next year.

There are some advanced features of Launchpad that Bold's Product Discount didn't have - like changing your theme, added security, and the ability to lock your store to create suspense. After spending so long just to set up the sale, I simply didn't have time to do any of this although I think they sound cool.

I hope shopify prioritizes the advancement of this app, it has a long way to go, but with some improvements it could be very useful.

Can't understand why two different launches can't overlap. Users can't launch a product at the same time as have a promotion on another collection via Launchpad is really really really dumb. Very unimpressed with Plus extra apps so far in our experience.