Snowball: Affiliate Marketing

The product itself would earn 4 stars from us. Onboarding was smooth, our account manager was helpful throughout, and the app is easy to set up and run.

Two things to know before installing.

First, affiliate marketing attracts fraud, and this app has no real playbook for it. We dealt with more scammers and bad-faith users than genuine customers who wanted to share the brand. Overseas coupon abusers, people gaming referral links, a major uptick in stolen credit cards being used to get referral sales for commission, and constant backend cleanup. We eventually figured out how to limit it ourselves to some degree, but the tooling and guidance were thin, and after running the numbers, the program cost us more than it brought in. That is partly the nature of affiliate marketing, and don't blame SS at all, but go in with eyes open.

Second, and this is why the review is 2 stars: the offboarding process. When you uninstall, Social Snowball permanently deletes ALL of your data within 24 hours. Every affiliate record, every commission balance, everything. While I understand there is compliance requirements with Shopify, there is no warning during uninstall. No pop-up, no banner, no dedicated email, no option to export your data first. Zero effort in helping avoid this problem or helping your customers.

Due to shipping times, we pay affiliates after orders are delivered (around 30 days for us), so we canceled expecting to log in and send final payments like any normal app billing cycle wind-down. Instead, everything was gone. We now cannot tell who we owe or how much. There is no process native to Shopify to track which affiliate is tied to what discount code. Support from both platforms confirmed there is no recovery and no workaround and Social Snowball did not take the issue very seriously. Absolutely feels like the second we unsubscribed, we were a nuisance and just annoying them with pretty basic requests, trying to simply pay our affiliates.

If you ever plan to leave, export everything and pay every affiliate to zero BEFORE you uninstall. Nobody will warn you, so this review is the warning.

My experience with Social Snowball has been phenomenal. Katie is the best CSM + incredibly helpful and responsive, and Ani is truly the best developer. I absolutely love working with them! They genuinely listen to our needs and even share feature requests with their team for future improvements. Making the switch from Impact to Social Snowball has been life-changing. Nothing but an amazing experience so far!

My experience with Social Snowball and their team has been phenomenal. I am impressed by how responsive and helpful they are. I also think it's really cool that if I encounter a need that isn't a feature of theirs yet, they communicate it to their team for consideration for future app improvements. Nothing but a good experience so far.