Appstle℠ Subscriptions App
Meets Shopify's highest quality standards for speed, ease of use, and merchant value
Reviews (4,205)
What merchants think
This is generated by Shopify Magic. It's shown when an app has 100+ reviews and a 4.0 overall rating.
This is generated by Shopify Magic. It's shown when an app has 100+ reviews and a 4.0 overall rating.
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Merchants highly recommend this app for its comprehensive subscription management features and user-friendly interface. They appreciate the customizable options like item swapping and personalized boxes, which integrate well with Shopify. The app is noted for its reliability and exceptional customer support, with staff providing responsive, personalized assistance, including custom video explanations. It's considered a valuable tool for businesses implementing subscription services.
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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.
Dear Merchant,
This is the co-founder and CTO of Appstle. I sincerely apologize for failing to meet your expectations. I have sent you a detailed email. Hopefully, we can address all your requirements by end of the week.
Looking forward to connecting.
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!!!
Hello,
We have checked out the issue thoroughly on our end with our developers, and according to the investigation, we believe something has changed in your theme, and it intermittently loaded our script twice, which caused the widget to show up twice on the product. We have made updated our code now, and things are working fine.
We've emailed you about the fix as well. Could you please confirm if the issue is fixed on your end? Please feel free to reach out if you need any other assistance, and we will be more than happy to help.
Since Appstle, similar to any other software, is a tool embedded in your store site, any change to your store (theme update or installation of other apps) may sometimes result in overriding or conflicting code. If that happens, please either involve your developers immediately to correct the conflicting codes, or reach out to us. Our support team is highly technical and will be able to fix it immediately.
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.
Hi Dear Merchant,
This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I really apologize for the inconvenience you faced. I have gone over your concerns, and have also connected with the Merchant Success Head who you spoke to regarding the issue. Thank you for providing us the opportunity to connect 1:1 to explain the shipping setup for subscriptions, and to work on your requirements real-time.
We hope things are now working smoothly and as expected! Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at ria@appstle.com or support@appstle.com if you have any other questions. We are available 24x7x365.
Worst experience ever. I never write bad reviews but I feel compelled to warn others against the repeating issues I faced. The customer portal was always having issues. repeated issues. sometimes double processing issues. the worst. When I would reach out to tech support they would say "looks good on our end" as if they had no responsibility for fixing their coding issues. I stayed with Appstle far too long. Now I have new subscription app with amazing tech support and I am kicking myself for not jumping ship earlier. buyer beware.
Dear Merchant,
This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. Thank you for the 1.5 years you were with Appstle, and we are sorry the last few weeks' were not up to the mark. While we regret that your final experience led to the feedback, I'd like to address the points. We hope you give us another try.
Customer Portal Issues:
Customer portal is an integral part of our app, and our team ensured that every reported issue was thoroughly investigated. After multiple checks by our team, the portal was confirmed to be fully functional each time you reached out. In instances where adjustments were needed based on your specific setup, we provided detailed guidance and solutions to help optimize the experience for your customers. We have now added a more detailed and step by step guidance document and video, to help merchants setup their perfect customer portal. Also, we are always available 24x7 to real-time guide merchants anytime needed.
Double Processing of Orders:
The double-processing issue was linked to a setting in the app that allowed customers to modify their billing intervals. This was a feature enabled by you, which is designed to offer flexibility to your customers. When this issue arose, our team provided personalized instructions, including screencast videos, to help you disable this feature. These settings are always fully within your control. We have now added more merchant tutorials within the section, and switched to an easier merchant UI, to make the settings navigation very easy.
We hope you will consider us again in the future as we continue improving and evolving our services.
The app doesnt even work. It does not show up in the product page and there is no way to customize it.
Dear Merchant,
We apologize you had a less-than-stellar experience with the app. We try to support as many themes as possible. However, for a few themes (especially if it’s a non-Shopify third-party theme), the widget might need additional configuration. We often do this configuration on our end to best support our merchants.
We have gone ahead and configured the widget on your store :). Please go ahead and take a look. We have 24X7 support and have updated you on the chat as well. If you need any other help with your store’s subscription offer, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
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
Hello. This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I went through your chats with the team. As our Merchant Success Engineer as well as her Manager mentioned in the chats and the custom video guide that she made for your store, your shipping rate was coming from your Shopify shipping profile itself. In fact, that’s why the one-time purchase shipping price and subscription shipping price was exactly the same. Since your one time purchase shipping was $12, for order values below a certain threshold, the same applied to subscriptions too. Let me assure you that no other Shopify native or Shopify compatible subscription app would be able to help you here, unless the shipping profile is created on the app side (which the Manager explained in the video she made).
I went over the loom my teammate shared and it was very well-explanatory. And no, shipping on checkout page is not calculated based on IP address. It’s based on the shipping address you enter.
As for the location of the team, we are a California based company HQed in Menlo Park. We provide 24x7 support for merchants by having support team across geographies and timezones. Since, your ticket came in at 8 PM PST (outside work hours in the California), it was handled by our team in Asia. I personally did not see any communication or language issues in your chat or video, as our entire team across geographies are native English speakers.
Please dont hesitate to reach out to us at support@appstle.com if you have any other questions.In fact, I am sharing it here so that others can decide it on their own. And no, shipping on checkout page is not calculated based on IP address. It’s based on the shipping address you enter.
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.
Hi,
My name is Logan and I'm the Director of Product here at Appstle. Your team has obviously had an bad experience with us and I want to see how I can help. First I want to address some of the points in your review.
Our team is working very hard to build out all of the functionality merchants need from us. In the past sometimes we have done this too fast and released features a bit early. Clearly this has created a negative experience for your team. While we do want to continue releasing new features and support our merchants needs, we have made some changes to the way we release features.
1. Our team now announces new updates to all merchants from our dashboard. Features that will change existing experiences will not be enabled by default, and will be fully merchant controled.
2. To improve user experience I have joined the Appstle team, coming from leading ecommerce at a North American Shopify Plus brand. We have made several recent user experience hires as well to address the exact points you made above. Expect to see some massive user experience improvements coming to the app shortly :)
3. We have reviewed the bugs mentioned in this review. Most have been resolved or are in the process of being resolved as a top priority. I'd love to make sure we can address all of your concerns in detail however.
We're building fast and learning along the way. One thing is for certain though, our merchants expect best in class user experience and stability. We are absolutely determined to deliver that. If you'd like we can get on a call together and discuss how we can create the perfect experience for you. I'd like to offer that I will handle your requests personally.
We are releasing an updated, significantly improved version of our build-a-box in the coming days. We need merchants like yourself to provide feedback so that we are absolutely certain we are providing the best experience possible. If you'd like to get on a call and discuss how we can implement a much improved build-a-box experience, and implement your suggestions, I'd be happy to do so. Send me an email at logan@appstle.com and I'll be happy to help.
On behalf on the entire team (they have all read your review) we apologize for the experience you've had with us so far. We'd be over the moon to turn it around for you.
Best,
Logan
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.
Dear Merchant,
This is Ria, the co-founder of Appstle. I sincerely apologize for your less than stellar experience with us. Since the time of the review, we have made a lot of feature additions and updates at Appstle, which cover the concerns you have raised. Merchants can now edit/update an existing shipping profile without having to re-create from scratch.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at ria@appstle.com or support@appstle.com if you have any other questions.
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
We are sorry our subscription model did not work for you. We are a native Shopify app and hence work only on the payment gateways allowed by Shopify for recurring orders.
Feel free to review this documentation from Shopify: https://shopify.dev/apps/subscriptions#known-limitations
Hopefully, we can work together in the future.
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.
Dear Merchant,
I am the co-founder of Appstle. I am sorry to hear that your experience with us hasn’t been great. I went through your tickets. Addressing the main one, in Shopify, whenever a product is deleted/recreated or a variant is updated, a new variant ID will be created. Hence the variants from your old contracts will not be present on Shopify. It will need to be updated. This would be true on any other app as well. However, we do have automation triggers for that at Appstle.
On the Migration front, we were restricted by the data we got - as in, it had missing pieces that were critical for a seamless transition from the competition app. That is why we had to go back and forth with you. It’s unfortunately not possible to speed up the migration if the data isn’t right.
I would love to personally jump in and see how I can help ensure you have a smooth move from WooCommerce and address any other doubts you may have. Skincare is one of the niches of Appstle, and we have hundreds of skincare category merchants who are very happy with us. I would love to jump on a call to ensure that you are one of them. Please reach out to me at ria@appstle.com
--Update
We have made improvements in our UI/UX and made it easier and more intuitive for merchants to update settings. Just look at our more recent reviews! We would like you to give us another try and let us know what you think of our new onboarding flow.