Navidium Shipping Protection

Hi there,

My name is Marc, and I am one of the co-founders of Navidium. First off, I want to apologize for any misunderstandings, frustrations, and of course disruptions the onboarding caused. It is never a good thing to see merchants struggle, and our team is ready and happy to make any issue right as fast as possible.

I'd like to address the concerns in the review to help shed light on it as best as I can.

Why we create a product with variants:

Shopify is a closed system, and in order to add a "surcharge" for the VIP protection service you are left with essentially adding a line item to the cart. There is rumors that shopify will soon be adding a "additional fee" API, but that rumor has been around for nearly a decade so best I can say is fingers crossed, when it arrives we will be the first to jump on it. But right now, every app of this type, from insurance, warranty, additional product options, etc all are stuck using "product line items" which does sadly pose a few downsides with reporting, feeds, etc.

We do generally do a good job hiding it, and have some videos in our app backend to show you how to hide it from some channels. This particular case (marketplaces) hasn't come up before, but now that I've seen this review, I'll make sure a video is added so that your experience can be a lesson learned for others.

Fortunately, it is often as easy as unchecking the sales channels, and excluding it from feeds, so just a tiny bit of work over-all and this issue essentially goes away. But, I recognize that we can do a better job communicating this going forward, and will do so!

2) Why do we have so many variants?

The short answer is dynamic pricing. Most merchants want to be able to charge a different amount depending on the order value. We use a % based system, and the variants allow for that to happen. It is by default set to a max of 1 product with 100 variants. However, our team has tools in place on our end to adjust those, add more or less, and can essentially resolve this when we are made aware of it.

The thinking is that a customer ordering $50 of items vs, $300 should not be paying the same amount for protection. Our dynamic settings allows for this to happen, and finds the closest available variant to use.

Again, this is something most similar apps employ in one form or another. I will look into finding ways to make this clearer, and our merchants who take demo's before installing are always shown this. The app listing on shopify is not very large, so it certainly poses a little challenge on how in-depth on the technical level we can get.

Why is all sales channels default on?

We sadly have to do this. We've tried it a few different ways in the past, and it turns out Shopify's API for creating products does not allow for selected sales channels to be enabled when you create a product. Since we MUST have the sales online channel enabled, it is either all or nothing. We tested having it all defaulted off, but it ended up causing a ton of trouble for merchants and reverted back to enable all.

But as mentioned earlier, communication is key, and so this will certainly be something we improve on.

My team and I are here to help resolve any issues. I've reached out personally to you, but you are welcome to email me directly any time at marc at ecompropeller.com and I'll ensure our team gets you up and running personally, as smoothly as possible.

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback, it means the world, and gives us a chance to look at ways we can improve our product and service!

- Marc H
Co Founder | Navidium App