Route: Post‑Purchase Platform

This service is free to stores, and it covers our lost or stolen orders so easily! We love the service!

TL;DR "Route has been marking orders on my store as "paid" when they have paid me nothing, causing me to ship items to customers for free. This happened twice and they've been emailed about it many times and they've totally ignored the issue. Emailed 3 seperate staff members and no reply. Absolutely pathetic." I've been using Route across various businesses for 6-9 months so far. I will stop using Route by the end of this week as I have discovered Route has been acting *FRAUDULENTLY* regarding at least my business. In theory Route sounds great. Customers pay a small amount to have their shipment insured, if something goes wrong Route handles it. Great right?
Well in theory yes it worked that way for a while. However I've had a few issues I needed to manually resolve with Route and after emailing them about 4 times to 3-4 different people there over the course of 1 entire month and not receiving ANY reply I must say their professionalism is completely lacking. What makes it more deeply concerning is I have found 2 orders in my store where Route has "placed an order" on my store for a customer who filed a "lost shipment claim". This is normal.......however what is not normal is Route placing that order for the customer and NOT PAYING FOR IT. Route is supposed to work in a simple way. Customer logs a claim for lost shipment and Route places an order on your store (and pays for that order) out of their own pocket because the customer paid for the insurance....so Route must buy them a new product if its been lost.
I found on two occasions Route marked the new order as "paid" but actually it was just dashboard panel "paid" and no money actually exchanged hands. This basically means that Route was placing orders on my store and getting me to send products to customers FOR FREE (because route is supposed to pay us/me/the merchant) for the replacement order.
Thats exactly how insurance works. Something gets lost the insurance company pays. Route has been marking orders on my store as "paid" when they have paid me nothing, causing me to ship items to customers for free. This happened twice and they've been emailed about it many times and they've totally ignored the issue. Emailed 3 seperate staff members and no reply. Absolutely pathetic.

Beyond frustrated with this app. First, it has been causing checkout issues for my customers from day one. If they selected Route, their entire cart would empty! When I contacted support I got the run around for months with them claiming it must be something else on my website. Eventually Shopify Theme Support was able to pinpoint the problem code and prove it was Route's coding that had been causing the issue. Even though I was able to provide the exact coding issue and tell Route support exactly how to replicate the issue, it still took weeks for them to resolve it. Then there's the whole reimbursement thing. Route issued a refund to one of my customers in November, and I have yet to receive the reimbursement for it! Once again, getting the run around from billing saying they paid it, without being able to provide one shred of proof that they have (transaction number, date, amount, etc.) All they can show is they were supposed to reimburse me, which I agree with. However my bank account shows they never did. Been trying to resolve this issue with billing for far too long! Their support is not helpful and I'm tired of getting the runaround. At the end of the day, your customers are still going to come to you if there's a shipping issue, so may as well handle it on your own and save yourself the extra headache.

My experience with Route was the worst I've had with any Shopify app. They have everything set up nicely to entice you to sign up and make sure they get paid from your customers opting in for protection. It took 40 days for me to get my claim reimbursed and countless excuses as to why week after week I couldn't get my payment. Also, be prepared to pay for the claims yourself then fight to get your money back from route. They don't send notification before the charges are reversed or when a claim is filed just be prepared to be surprised by a negative balance in your shopify store. It took me contacting Shopify merchant support to get my claim reimbursed. I definitely do not recommend this app.

5/12/2020

Update: I am updating our review to 4 stars based on Routes follow-up on the issues in our first review.

Part of our issue is that we didn't spend enough time getting to understand the claims process. Customers can file their own claim using the link in the Route confirmation email. Our customer encountered an error in this process. The screen on his mobile device froze and he could not process the claim. We were unaware that we can also process a claim on their behalf using the Route dashboard in Shopify Apps. As is the case with most unhappy customer experiences our anxiety about getting them taken care of quickly created a tense situation. If we had been more aware of our ability to assist in filing the claim we may not have been as frustrated with Routes initial slow response to the issue. Route did respond within a couple business days which I felt was unacceptable and is one of two things they need to fix. The second being the customer experience with filing a claim on their mobile device. I did ask to be made aware of what created this issue and that it has been resolved. I have not heard back.

Overall the Route App is solid. I don't agree with other reviews about the difficulty installing the code. It was easy for us and Route helped to get it completed in a timely basis.

The service itself is very popular. We sell high ticket goods and nearly all customers opt in to Route.

Route quickly paid the claim and initiated an order through Shopify on the customers behalf. They used a credit card on the system so FGI and the customer were made whole.

I would also like to know more about what is required in making a claim. And what Route does with the carrier in return. What happens to the damaged goods? Who pays to ship them back? How does a carrier receive feedback about damaged shipments so they can improve their ship service? But these are not high priority questions.

If Route continues to improve and the service continues to be popular we'll be along term happy customer.

Kevin Sullivan
CEO
Forever Green Indoors

5/2/2020

UPDATE: After escalating the claim to a number of people I received communication from a Route Executive and another individual who were both helpful and apologetic about the delayed responses to our customer. He offered the customer an option for a refund, or a replacement. The customer elected for a replacement and Route purchased the product on his behalf to settle the claim. This was our first experience with a claim, and although not ideal, it seems to have satisfied our customer so we are satisfied as well at this time. I moved the review up to 3 stars. And I will move it up again if we continue to experience positive improvement with the Route team. I now recommend Route again, with the caveat that it would be a good idea to discuss expectations of claim communication. I'm unsure if the issue our customer faced with the mobile app for making claims has been fixed. We'll do what we can to look in to that. It would have likely avoided much of this review.

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5/1/2020

Very disappointed with Route. I had high hopes with the service. Our customers were nearly unanimously selecting to pay for the extra coverage. Our first claim involved an unhappy customer who received a badly damaged product shipped by UPS. The customer was unable to file a claim with route. Repeated attempts to contact sales failed. Unsure if the people who sold us this are even working there now. Had some success with technical support connecting us with a product support person who sent a curt email that Route was experiencing "high volumes of claims due to Covid 19". I am really disappointed in Route and we've disabled it in our cart. If the matter is resolved I'll change this review. At this point I'd give it fewer than one star for the money they collected versus the service they have provided. Avoid this app.

This app came in very handy when dealing with missing packages! Prior, we were constantly back and forth with the post office and the Route claims process made it very simple to come to a resolution. Super seamless platform.

We have been using this service for a couple of months now. Almost every customer selects it at check out. BUT route denies every claim. So disappointing. This was supposed to help customers feel more secure about packages being protected but this app is such a letdown. We will be going back to our old insurance app.

The app was installed okay and works. Customers are just not using the service. https://www.kinkytoy.store/

I have never written a review but I felt like I had to in order to WARN YOU of route's FRAUDULENT business model.
They do not honor anything they claim to protect. They just say, this claim did not fit our protection policy. they make money off of you and PISS your customers OFF!

We are currently self insuring our packaging, we are very happy and immediately send a replacement in case of a loss or damage and we are in control of our customers happiness and the money WE KEEP kind of evens out WITH THE MONEY OF LOSS. SO, if route is legitimate, how can they make profit and satisfy your customers?

THE ANSWER IS THEY DON'T, THEY ONLY MAKE MONEY AND LEAVE YOU AND YOUR CUSTOMER PISSED.

UTTER DISRESPECT.

There have been more customers buy this than I expected. Seems like customers (and us) see a lot of value in the insurance since it is so cheap to get. Excited to keep using this for our business!