Recart: SMS & List Growth

BEWARE, WE LOST MONEY WITH RECART - READ THIS BEFORE YOU SIGN AN AGREEMENT.

$10,000+ lost in revenue with Recart due to platform bugs.

My experience with Recart has been disappointing due to their platform filled with many bugs, declining performance, lack of promised support, strategy, billing discrepancies, and failure to execute agreed-upon tasks.

The app and the service has not only failed to deliver on its promises but has also negatively impacted our revenue and business operations.

Read my experience below. You will thank me later. Let me explain.



Prior to moving to Recart in March 2024 I was using Postscript for 4+ years and generated seven digits in sms revenue by managing it in-house.

So i know the technical side, strategy, optimizations and how things should work if you know what you are doing, and if the platform works as intended or not.

I decided to move to Recart to save time and because they promised (via email and on their website) they will handle EVERYTHING: strategy, execution, optimizations, AI tests, A/B tests and will match our custom price. It sounded amazing, I was like it can’t be that bad, like what can they mess up, so I pulled the trigger and signed an agreement. Oh boy, was I wrong. 



PLATFORM BUGS - lost $10,000+ in revenue due to browse, add to cart, checkout abandonment flows not working as good as they work on Postscript. The worst part, I had to escalate and ping their team many times, so finally after few months they “discovered” the bug and apparently fixed it but still it was NOT working as it should. I know this from a fact, when we were for 4+ years with Postscript I would get hit by abandonment flow message almost every week. So my guess is their technology for recognizing users and events is not up to the level compared to Postscript and on the top of that it’s has bugs that they are not even aware of.

So if you use Recart you are losing money on these automated flows because the users are not triggering the Recart events and/or they can’t recognize the users.



POOR SERVICE - be careful, it’s not what’s advertised, at least it was not for us, their CEO Soma confirmed that there was misunderstanding in the offered service, so basically misleading advertising. I was like why you did not tell me this before? if you sign an agreement ask for detailed scope of work and deliverables along with the cadence. I made a huge mistake of signing an agreement that was super vague and gave them chance to not delivered what was promised. Also depends who is your assigned account manger, and also depends how much you are spending, low spend you are getting minimal support and non US rep.

I was also told I’m asking a lot of questions and I’m taking up a lot of their time to address my concerns.



NON TRANSPARENT PRICING - there is no way to figure out the charges, applied credits, sms usage, from the platform UI, it’s NOT transparent, even their team has hard time understanding the billing, credits, roll over credits etc it’s all a black box. You can’t verify it yourself. They acknowledge it it’s not transparent.



HIDDEN OVERCHARGES - after complaining about their non transparent charges and being unable to verify myself why I was charged the amounts, they told me they are refunding me money because they apparently discovered an issue with roll over credits or whatever it was.

Imagine If I was not doing my due diligence, no one would have discovered the issue.

So now imagine how many of the brands that use Recart were potentially impacted by the same issue and the bugs I have discovered?

Incorrect Attribution and Inflated Metrics - We had agreed on a specific 1-day click attribution model to track performance accurately. Despite multiple confirmations, Recart applied a different attribution model, inflating performance metrics for several months. The issue was only corrected after I escalated it on June 3rd, meaning all prior data was unreliable.

Lack of Reporting and Strategic Support - there was a period of 2+ months where we haven't received any performance reports, there was a noticeable absence of strategic guidance and poor execution. We haven't had any strategy sessions or received proactive recommendations for over two months, leaving us without direction in our SMS marketing efforts.

Billing Discrepancies - Our contract clearly stated a rate of $0.0075 per message, but we've been consistently billed at approximately $0.0077 per message. While this might seem minor per message, over thousands of messages, it results in significant overcharges, violating our agreed payment terms.

Other promised services that were not delivered: Incorrect URLs in Campaigns: Despite clear instructions and agreements, campaigns went out with incorrect URLs, confusing customers and potentially losing sales. Scheduled Campaigns Not Sent: Planned campaigns were missed, leading to lost revenue opportunities. Flows Not Reactivated: Critical flows weren't updated to reflect current offers, rendering them ineffective. Abandonment Flows Malfunctioning: For over six months, I didn't receive any browser, checkout, or add-to-cart abandonment SMS messages, indicating these flows weren't functioning properly. No A/B Testing: We were promised proactive A/B pop-up testing and AI-driven personalization, but these initiatives were never implemented.

Gave them 2 stars, because they were kinda trying to make things right but mostly because they finally agreed to terminate the agreement with no penalty, however the damage is done, they are aware of it, and they still owe me $5,000+ due to the automations not working properly.

As soon as I moved back to Postscript I made more revenue with the abandonment automations in 3 days than Recart abandonment automations generated in 7+ months. That’s how bad their platform and technology is.

They should also compensate me for the time I spent discovering all the crucial bugs and issues on their platform.

At first, we thought that we found the right app for our business, our Facebook messenger blast works really well, but suddenly the performance of this app fluctuates, as we noticed during our monthly sale, total message sent decreases until the campaign just activate and do nothing. We try to seek help to their Support Team but unfortunately, they can't also provide us the answer why it happens, Vivien, one of the CS Support just tell us that their experience with Sponsored Messages is still the same, it is a hit or miss, meaning they are not confident that the app performance will work for us.

This app is good but the support SUCKS! It is IMPOSSIBLE to get your list of emails from abandon carts sent to you! They never respond to messages or emails! HORRIBLE SERVICE! Beware!

Lots of problems, did not work correctly, in one month we had to pay 3 times, no money back......
Also big speed problems with shop.

You can use them to get your products market price all wrong without any permissions. I tried this app, but it just added a discount code open to public without any pre-talk or try to get any permissions from us, which caused us much more headaches than we don't have them.

So, it quickly becomes apparent that the impressive stats that Recart claim on all their promotions about how they increase sales, are a little tenuous. They count anyone that signs up for a discount code then purchases as a conversion enabled by them - as if the customer wouldn't have purchased otherwise. But in reality all they are doing is pestering customers with tacky discount codes - customers that would have purchased in any case.
Real value comes in attracting back abandoned checkouts, and unfortunately it appears that Recart are much less successful at achieving this than they would have you believe.
Since installing Recart I have actually seen a reduction in sales, which I attribute to the popup 'conversation starter' which just feels dropship-spammy, and subsequent Messenger hassling. I don't think I'll be using Recart again. The biggest con is all those conversions in their marketing copy they claim to have 'unlocked' for users of Recart, which are really just sales that would have occurred in any case. Very cheeky.