Preorder Notify Me Pre‑Order T

Hi, this is Andrei - co-founder here at Timesact. Let me start by apologizing for your bad experience. Regardless of the facts and circumstances, if someone takes the time to write a bad review that means we have ultimately failed and as the CEO of Timesact I take full responsibility and will do my best to try and learn and improve things for you and all our customers.

Because this is a public review my responsibility is to write a reply for you but also for the few people that want to get both sides for more context and last but not least our team.

1. “The Customer Service team has a great turn around time and is super helpful”
1. This is very true. Our team is dedicated to a fault and I am glad that even as upset as you were when writing this you took the time to acknowledge this. Thank you! You can imagine how they felt last night when everyone was focused on trying to help you (some staying overtime just to try and be there to help and make sure you were ok) and at one point communication stopped and the next thing they saw was this review. So thank you for being thoughtful and not putting it on them.

2. “but the pricing on this app is deceptive. The app store price shows $6 for paid but really the app charges per the number of pre-paid orders.”
2. The real price is $6.65 for the plan in question and it is written on the app page plainly that it is for 10 pre-orders + emails per month. Also mentioned there is that Higher plans available in the app. I honestly am not sure how this can be deceptive or what else should be written there to not give you this impression. Your feedback here is most welcome.

3. “You are looking at $60 for 250 orders”
3. The real price for 250 pre-orders is $51

4. “you still need a front ender to style the buttons and text or it looks funky.”
4. This is the first I am hearing of this. I am sure that if you would have said something on this topic we would have bent over backwards to try and help you as we would for anyone asking for help. We were never given that chance.

5. “The app does not hold payments”
5. The app does not claim to hold payments. Judging any product by features it does not have is a guarantee to be easily dissatisfied. I am sure that if I were to judge your store based on the brands of coffee you do not sell I could find plenty of reasons to complain but it would be a very roundabout way to solve my problem. I would just move on to the place that sells them. As a side note we are working on this and will release it by mid 2023.

6. “so the majority of the features you can build yourself if you have dev support.”
6. Of course you can build anything with enough time, developers and resources. What I can tell you from our experience is that this is not such a simple task and it will take a lot of effort and sacrifices that most people will never acknowledge.

7. “If I had known the price upfront I would have looked for other options.”
7. The prices are not hidden. If you read our app listing you have the information there. Shopify only allows us to list 4 possible plans so naturally we listed the first 4 possible plans. But on each one it says plainly that we have Higher plans available in the app. The information is also readily available in the Account tab in the app. And of course we also describe it in the free onboarding we offer as well as on email/chat support if anyone has any questions on the topic. Checking our logs I could not find any questions from you around this topic.

8. “When we ran out of the 10 free paid orders, the app immediately stopped working”
8. This is correct. It is a failsafe we have in place because it happens often that people with viral products would abuse the system and then not pay for the resources they used. Anyone on a paid plan gets a 24 hour grace period to upgrade (from the moment they get the email notification from us) during which time they can still get orders.

Some additional mentions here.

a) We send out an email when 70% of the free plan is used up and another one when 100% is used up. You received those as well.

b) We did make a mistake because our CTO sent you the 24 hour grace period answer and did not specify it was only for folks on a paid plan. For this we apologize. It happened at the end of a 14 hour shift so admittedly our CTO Robert was tired. He went on to work another 2 hours and extended the chat hours by the same time beyond the normal schedule in the hopes of continuing the conversation with you but was unlucky.

9. “and I was scrambling with their UI to pay for the upgrade to not hurt any customer journeys.”
9. Upgrading is done in the Account tab in the app as it is in most apps. In addition you had support from us on chat and email and the entire process took minutes. We offered to take a look and check if any orders were impacted during those minutes but have yet to hear back from you.

The fact that you are still using the app after trying two alternatives (happy to help you with a code clean up for them post uninstall free of charge of course) gives me hope for the future. Hopefully communication will restart when you are ready and that will improve your experience. I am genuinely looking forward to working with you on making app improvements because I believe in people and I also believe that your intention here was to start a discussion and not to hurt a small business. Please prove me right! That would really make my day!