Appstle℠ Subscriptions App

Dec 10, 2023 UPDATE: STAY THE HELL AWAY. THEY JUST DOUBLE AND TRIPLE BILLED HUNDREDS OF OUR SUBSCRIPTIONS. WE HAD TO MANUALY FIND, CANCEL AND REFUND OVER 300 ORDERS AND LOST OVER A DOZEN SUBS. YES THEY OFFERED A 20% DISCOUNT AFTER APOLOGIZING. JUST A LOT OF HEADACHES. TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A MIGRATION STRATEGY...
January 9, 2023 UPDATE: Like I said before, they will pacify you, blame Shopify, tell you they opened a ticked with Shopify, and you will never hear from them again. Still have not heard from them - supposedly they opened a ticket with Shopify - but they were very quick to reply to my review update / change on Dec 5 when I dropped them to 1 star.
December 5, 2022 UPDATE: After approximately 16 months of using the app, I am changing my rating just because of lack of support. Support has really gone so downhill over the last 6-9 months, it is sad!!! Changing my 5-star review to 1 star because response time has become unacceptable. I was probably one of their first 100 customers. I have over 4000 subscriptions and have been very patient but really their support has become an issue. It's not just "growing pains" anymore - they will pacify you and/or blame Shopify until you're blue in the face - to the point where you just give up and try to find a workaround.

It's been extremely frustrating working with Appstle as our subscription management app. We've been trying to fix all issues and talk to the developers, but things don't improve, they don't really take their time to understand what we are asking, and what is not asking and work towards answering or fixing them.

Sometimes they answer by saying they don't have a certain feature and in fact, they do, their customer service just doesn't know it. The only reason we haven't left Appstle is that every time we change a subscription app it affects OUR customers' experience and we don't want to cause another friction with them until we find a better app/solution.

I would NOT recommend purchasing/adding this app to your Shopify store, and if you have one to recommend to us, please do, we'd really appreciate it.

Bug after bug after bug!!! This app is poorly made. I've used it over a year now and every 2 weeks there is a serious bug that needs to be fixed. The ONLY reason I have not switched apps is because they have no way of migrating the subscription data to a new app, so we need to leave the app installed for our older subscriptions. DO NOT USE THIS APP, SAVE YOURSELF THE HEADACHE!!!

I cannot recommend the app. I recently asked for support to set up a shipping profile so customers from a specific country would get free shipping when subscribing to a product, and customers from other countries would still need to pay shipping. What happened? The App has a serious flaw and customers outside these countries that are meant to receive free shipping were not able to check-out at all anymore. I have lost sales due to this app and when raising this to their customer service - their attitude towards the issue was absolutely unacceptable. Instead of being curious to understand the issue they basically blamed me for their flawed app. I cannot recommend this app and surprised they have so many positive reviews.

The app doesnt even work. It does not show up in the product page and there is no way to customize it.

Had to remove the app, installed it for about 1 hour, try to fix a shipping issue (the product was for $0 of shipping in shopify, but the app added a shipping cost of $12 for no reason). Impossible to reach anyone from the US or Canada via customer service, all coming from India. Their english was really bad, and not only did they not solve the issue, but made everything worse. There's so many apps for subscription our there, do yourself a service a choose another. At least you might have a shot at minimally good customer service, and not too many is

This app is like a constantly ticking time bomb. All their app changes are done in real time, so your customers will have a front-row seat to some real messy changes until the developers finally get it right. Which they rarely do, because aside from a very reckless, sluggish team of developers, they have no marketer or designer to explain to them what a good customer journey is. So it falls upon us to try to explain to them things such as why not having quantity selectors in a build-a-box and forcing the customers to go in and out of every individual item just to add them to a pseudo-cart only to then proceed to a real one is a terrible customer journey. The app’s architecture and design are a total mess. You have the regular subscription plan, normally you can choose a build-a-box option, but here, you have to stack that option on top of an existing plan, and for some reason you can enter a discount in both places. And here where it gets even messier: if you enter the discount in the subscription plan, it's built into the price, but you can't have a compare price, and if you enter it in the build-a-box extension, it's entered at the checkout as a discount code. And to make matters even worse, any product added into the build-a-box will forcefully have its own subscription widget, and the only way around it is to disable ALL widgets everywhere. As for their recklessness, here are a few examples: - overriding basic Shopify css elements (your visa, mastercard and other payment logos suddenly line up vertically)
- when I tell them about that, they go ahead and ADD more messy code to override the code that’s overriding Shopify’s default
- whenever they add a new element, there’s no translation field for it, so if your shop runs in another language, expect English words to always pop up randomly.
- subscription widgets aren’t automatically enabled for collections, and there’s no install repository where you can get the code and do it yourself immediately, you have to wait for their team to send you that snippet. (and the response time and/or useful feedback drops dramatically once your trial period ends.)
- and when I did get the code it was in broken HTML, so I am thankful I told them to send that to me and not have them run that on our store somewhere. - as mentioned above, all the live changes done without informing us and us having a ‘code red’ every single time. - irresponsible, misinformed feedback: even questions such as “do your subscription + loyalty discounts stack up or are they multiplied by one another?” don’t get a correct answer and you literally have to run the math for them to show their answer didn’t make sense. I could go on and on… In short: unintuitive, unreliable and extremely time-consuming.

This app has really stressed me out. I want to offer our customers a pre-pay subscription option, where we win with cash-flow, and they win with a product discount. However the shipping profiles / settings do not make any sense, as I don't want them to get free deliveries that I don't deem them to be entitled to.
I am told it's not possible to create a pre-pay option where our current website delivery charges are applied (free delivery when you spend £40). With the pre-pay option, if a customer spends £40 total spread across 3x deliveries (i.e. we spend 3x the amount on deliveries - about £8 x 3) they get free delivery, which is exactly NOT what I want as we just loose money (if we spend £8 on each delivery, it means we spend £24 delivery for a total pre-pay order of £40). I need them to spend at least £40 for each DELIVERY (so that's £120 total for 3x separate delivery slots) to get free delivery. But apparently this is not possible, which I find really unhelpful.
Some of the chat people are helpful, but it takes longer than expected for them to reply and one just left the chat today and was marked as 'away' without warning. I wish there was a phone number I could call so someone could just talk it through with me.
Also, when you've created a new delivery profile, these can't be edited. So if you get one little thing wrong that you want to change, you have to do it all again.

Looks great but pointless as it does not work with sage pay UK payments. This should be flagged wasted a lot of time and disappointed customers

My company has been using this app since September 2022. In that time, our experience has been awful. Do not be fooled by the many 5 star reviews. We went with this app because of the "excellent reviews".

Here are the reasons why you shouldn't go with this app:
The support team is completely uneducated on the app and could not help me with any issues I brought up from the start. We switched from WooCommerece to Shopify and Appstle promised that we could transfer our previous subscriptions over. The process was on-going even after launching our Shopify site. The support team kept telling us different things and promising a quick turn around, none of which happened.

Additionally, the company behind the app is incredibly dishonest about what the app can do and how much it costs. And to make matters worse, the company frequently makes changes to the app without any warning. These changes often break the app, leaving users like myself frustrated and unable to operate our businesses effectively. It's incredibly frustrating to have to constantly worry about whether or not the app will work the way it's supposed to.

They recently changed what customization you have control of based on what tier you pay for without telling us. So our widget broke and lost all of our branding. When I contacted support, they asked if we had made any changes to the widget and they didn't understand what "branding" is. I had to dig around the app to discover that they had made this change. Now they want us to pay 3 times what we are currently paying them on a monthly basis.

Lastly, the app has a horrid UI/UX design. The layout is confusing and difficult to navigate, and the overall user experience is not enjoyable. It feels like the developers put little thought into making the app user-friendly, which is unacceptable given the high cost of the subscription.

Overall, I would not recommend this app to anyone. It's not worth the headache and hassle that comes with it. These are just a few issues we have had over the last 6 months, the list is a lot longer. Save your money and look for a better option elsewhere.