Shopicial ‑ Community Forum , 34 reviews

I chose to stick it out with this app for a while longer since I have a small membership. I am still very frustrated that I have never gotten replies on my inquiries and had to figure out my own solutions for some of my troubles. That said, I've made it work because I really do love a lot about this app. I like:
- The way I can categorize the posting sections and tag them so users with certain permissions can see each one.
- The look and feel and entire layout
- The polling and product options in posts
- The icons I dislike:
- New issue - the badges are no longer available and all settings in the USER category just displays "This feature is no longer available on your forum."
- Lack of response on questions
- Redirect issue for plan selections which caused me to lose paying customers
- Clunky - No reward system for users (but I know that's just me.) ;)
- Workarounds I've had to do with tagging and allowing for permissions and creating my own subscription since I can't get theirs to work and they don't respond + the manual labor this causes with every subscription
- Easy to navigate on the back end Dec 2020
This app is honestly REALLY great and perfect in a lot of ways. However, I am using it for paid users and they are unable to pay for a membership due to getting routed in circles back to log in every time they click the plan they want to purchase. I am losing customers now and have been waiting for a response for two days. I like the app so much, that I'm looking into doing my own subscription service and tagging the accounts for access instead of doing the billing through shopicial. It's just not automated, so that sucks. But, they may be able to keep me as a paid customer if I can figure out a workaround. It's just really not ideal. I am starting to feel like I cannot trust them since they don't respond very quickly and I can see my issue has been happening for others for some time. ONE time they did respond within 24 hours, so that was nice. I completely understand it's likely a very small company with limited resources, but leaving people in the dark is just not helpful. I see a few others mentioning issues with Google ads - Shopicial made a VERY clear notification that pops up in the dashboard about this issue with specific JS files. They give directions on how to remove the files and I'm a novice and was able to follow this and get my Google ads back up in less than 24 hours. So don't let that deter you. Happy to update the rating when I hear back from them! Nov 2020
I am on day 6 of 7 with this app. My chief complaint is that I inquired with support days ago and have yet to receive a response. This makes me nervous that if there are issues that pop up, as they inevitably will with any software, that they might not get fixed right away. =( This is a big enough deal that I knocked two stars off. That said, I would give the software's UI (user interface) a 5 star. I found it easy to understand and navigate and didn't need a tutorial at all. I just simply clicked through each section on their dashboard and figured everything out be reading. I think the software itself is great because it sort of looks like Facebook so customers will be familiar, but is less chaotic and also NOT Facebook. The categories also make it a lot easier to keep things organized, vs a Facebook group where EVERYTHING is just lumped together in one feed. I LOVE the icons for the categories and feel it all looks very professional. The way you can search and post your products on a post is also a super cool feature. All in all, I think this software does more than it appeared to at first glance. That said, as long as some bugs get fixed and support replies to me, I would be willing to bump this up to a 4 or even 5 star app. Some of what's wrong - The notifications are not working correctly at the moment for some accounts, so this is alarming for me. If my coaches are tagged and they don't get a notification they will not know that they need to respond. If you have multiple things forums with different levels of access, you will need to manually tag the accounts if they are to access more than one level because of the way the settings are set up. You can only give ONE tag access to a forum. For example, I have 3 tiers with my membership. Each tier gets more access. The top tier therefore needs to access 3 categories, but can only access one until I go in and manually tag them. No big unless you have a large volume of users or people want immediate access. The webpages on this design are also not all the way responsive. The forum itself is, but not the gated page to the forum where people will log in or learn what they're looking at. Finally, there's no way I can age gate the forum. But I recognize this would fall under a feedback category, not a software issue. ;)

The "about" section does not appear on the mobile page, you have to turn it tlandscape. great response times so far. great useage!