Marsello: Omnichannel Loyalty

Update 01/04/22: Marsello team was quick to respond and provided me my customers data as requested. They were considerate to offer me some generous offers on their plan so that I could have time to decide if Marsello is right for my store. I’ll update again and review the app itself once I’ve come to a decision to keep Marsello or not.
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Been using this app since the beginning, but my account was suddenly ‘paused’ because apparently the plan that I was on is no longer in existence. No notification, no reminder, no warning whatsoever. I’m left in the blue with no customer points information and was informed that I would need to reinstate the account to retrieve the information and the plan is way out of my budget. I’m now awaiting for their follow up to see if they could at least provide my customers points information.

Marsello while having some great features for our loyalty offering isn't without it's hiccups. It has taken over a week to sort out issues changing from Lightspeed/woocommerce/marsello to Lightspeed/shopify/marsello and while the front support are helpful it can be hours for a response and in our case with things going to the technical team, days for a answer. Still weighing up wether the cost per system (if you have a physical store and an online store you get charged for each system) is worth the cost..

In some ways, Marsello is great, but I am regularly surprised by the absence of features that I would consider to be standard, especially given the hefty price tag that Marsello comes with.

- There is no way to offer bonus loyalty points for the purchase of a specified product. Read that again.
- The email campaign editor can't pull live data from Shopify. If you want to feature products in an email, you'll be spending a lot of time copy-pasting data from your Shopify store into Marsello. If you're coming from the native Shopify email tool, it'll feel like a significant downgrade.
- Due to limitations in how Shopify performs discounts, something as simple as a reward that offers 100% off of a specified product is not possible. Instead, Marsello performs an order discount with a hard-coded value, which results in unexpected tax calculations and the need to revise discounts in Marsello whenever product prices change in Shopify. While this is largely a Shopify problem, Marsello has not kept up with the latest changes on Shopify's end, such as the option to combine discounts.

Positives worth acknowledging:
- Support is quick to respond to my requests (I am in GMT-3).
- The default customer segments are useable and easy to understand.
- Custom segmenting is intuitive.
- Multi-site reporting is well-done.

*EDITED TO CLARIFY*: Doesn't work if you have mailchimp *popup signup form* installed. Support responds quickly, but so far they've just responded with "it doesn't work with mailchimp's *popup*, youll have to disable one or the other." and no actual fixes. I wouldn't pay for this app, but I'll continue to use the free part since shopify apps charge way too much for simple functionality, and I can't find anything else worth the cost.

SUMMARY: Well designed UI, intuitive, affordable. An excellent option for merchants looking to fast track loyalty and email without worrying about complex trigger/workflow automation and HTML email template coding. Not suited for merchants requiring custom workflow automation as you are currently limited to 5 triggers. This is sufficient for most merchants.

I am willing to update this review provided the service provider addresses my in-app questions. Support started off excellent but is beginning to wane. Not offering live chat from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET USA is, well, unwise IMHO. Overall, this is a good service for merchants seeking an affordable, easy-to-use loyalty and email marketing solution. The design editor is promising but lacks basic features such as image overlay, saved content blocks, abandoned cart layout customization, etc. Another issue is the inability to reorder email blocks within flows. The current setup is linear/sequential; it needs to be non-linear/non-sequential. What good is a duplicated block if you can't relocate it? This service has a lot of potential provided the developers to enhance the design editor to match or surpass competing solutions which specialize in email automation. I can easily show this company what they need to focus on the drive user adoption AND retention. Kudos for the slick UI. Much appreciated.

UPDATE #1: I almost forgot to comment on the loyalty program which has pros and cons. PROS: several layout options for your loyalty widget; intuitive interface. CONS: No way to change the shape of the loyalty widget button; can't upload custom graphic; no way to easily generate the embed code for a dedicated loyalty page; Instagram reward earned by simply clicking the button whilst logged in; product reviews only work with Shopify Reviews which suck; no way to hide button on mobile. All-in-all its an affordable entry-level loyalty option with much room for growth. I look forward to working with Marsello to enhance the service.

UPDATE #2 — Fri Apr 26, 2019: My struggle to make AND keep meaningful contact continues. The company struggles to deliver consistent support. I'm looking forward to updating this review for the betterment of the Shopify community. Words to live by: The best customers are the ones you have.

Sales and premium onboarding team were great. I am struggling with the Lightspeed POS (R-Series) integration and support is consistently hard to reach and I am struggling to keep hope that we can resolve our issues. I will update this review if we can resolve this.

We paid for the Upgraded Onboarding feature and Danielle was very helpful in getting us set up in a timely fashion. The merger went relatively smoothly compared to our previous experience with Loyalty Lion. The texting messaging characters should be increased. 116 characters barely give you enough breathing room to promote a deal and say thank you. I don't believe the click rate is working properly as we have sent 9,000+ texts and haven't had a single click-through. (Although I clicked on the text message myself) We have multiple Shopify Stores and each store has multiple locations. I wish there was a feature to put everything under one roof like we do with Shopify+. It doesn't make sense that we would need to pay for an app that we already have with a store once again. I do like the Feedback feature. It is nice to see honest feedback from our clients so we know where to improve. Overall, I rate Marsello a 3 star due to the SMS Character restrictions and not having a multi-store feature only a multi-location feature. I have used Fivestars (my favorite but didn't connect with Shopify), loyalty lion, SMS bump, and a few others. Marsello is still better than anything else I have come across.

It just doesn't look professional and looks cheap. I had 1 in 300 visitors even bother using it. Better off going a different route for me

I have to admit that the app is good, but last week they had a different pricing with a different plans, now they changed their pricing rules, I did't get the chance to install it when the $50 plan was for $9.99