Paid Marketing by Shoelace

While we had a great run with the earlier version of Shoelace, the recent upgrade has been nothing but a nightmare. Expensive, complex, difficult to use and the once great support has sadly gone amiss. Spelling mistakes and bad links in campaigns & campaigns submitted that are irrelevant and not discussed with us. We've had enough, cancelled and moved on.

The app has been working great for us (easy to setup for store owners that are beginners in retargeting).
HOWEVER SHoelace recently turned off and then turned on all of our ads. So ALL OF OUR SOCIAL PROOF ON OUR ADS IS GONE. Weve spent hundreds of dollars to get lots of happy customers liking and commenting on our posts. and now we have to start ALL OVER AGAIN. I do not recommend this app.

Seems cool... Not really sure if it works though...

I started the "free trial" there is no free here, they ask for your credit card and to start paying, then the fees are very high for what looks like a very primitive and limited product

*** Updated Jan 7th, 2016 ***
I spoke with David Berglas, one of the founders of Shoelace, over the phone tonight. He heard me out and apologized for the poor experience. He's a great guy and I believe I offered some solid feedback for how they can improve the app.

I am a unique user and had a bad experience, but many of their users are seeing great results.

He admitted they need to improve the statistics on their backend as far as reporting as well as monitor the ad-spend more closely to determine whether ads are converting or not. He also mentioned they were advertising for the products we had that were sold out, which they will fix and improve in the future.

I'm hoping all issues get fixed because this would be a great app for a majority of shopify owners when 100% complete! I look forward to updating my rating to a higher rating when I test again in the next few months.

*** Previous Rating ***
I'm changing my rating from 1-startLet me preface this by saying I'm a serial entrepreneur and I specialize in marketing. I've also used other retargeting software like Perfect Audience, Adroll, and FB retargeting ads.

Shoelace markets as being "retargeting on autopilot". This is 100% true, except for the fact that the "auto" in autopilot is likely drunk, has a low IQ, and poor communication skills. I viewed the ads they created on my behalf through a secondary FB account, and they weren't very convincing from a buyers perspective. They were plain, simple, and didn't set the product out from any of the rest of the advertisements.

There is also LITTLE to NO CONTROL over the ad software, so you don't get to choose when your ads are showing or who they are showing to for how long.

This software also attributes any sale that happens after someone clicks one of their ads to their software ... this is poor statistics because just because they clicked on the ad, doesn't mean that convinced them to buy. It could be they were already planning to buy, and saw the ad as an easy link back to your site. This causes Shoelace to boast that it is having a bigger impact than it really is.

Lastly, Shoelace didn't work for the first 15 days I had it installed. I had to email customer support several times for things to start working. They also have statistics on the backend that do not properly track or report costs so there is no way to see why your ads are costing so much. We had 405 visits to our website as a result of their ads and that cost us $260 ... which is 64 cents per click, a lot compared to other platforms.

Tested this system for a month with their retargeting managed service. Their initial proposal for ad creative was essentially cookie-cutter with almost no brand personalization. We had a negative ROI throughout the entire test. Their activation team tried to make some adjustments, but there really wasn't much of shift in strategy or urgency in making things head in a positive direction.
Our self-managed ads perform wonderfully so it's pretty shocking that Shoelace couldn't even hit a 1x ROAS.
The team was pretty responsive which was nice, but they didn't seem to have a legitimate concern about getting things in the right path. Had high hopes, but would not recommend.

Little bit disappointed. My own re-target ads got much better results.