WorkMate

Do not use this product, it is not ready.

We really wanted this partnership to work. We did everything we could as a customer to be a good partner, share feedback, and look for solutions. It ended up being a major disaster for our techstack and a waste of 12 weeks of work.

Last fall, we came across Workmate through a Shopify-hosted webinar. We were actively migrating off LightSpeed onto Shopify and the webinar positioned Workmate as the solution for bike shops in our exact situation. It was a compelling pitch. It was also, as we'd come to learn, almost entirely disconnected from the reality of their product.

We planned our migration for December, our slow season, to minimize risk. During the demo and analysis phase leading up to go-live, we found serious problems. Features that didn't work. Workflows that made no sense. The scheduling tool was inefficient in ways that should have been obvious for anyone demoing it. These should have been dealbreakers. We gave them the benefit of the doubt anyway. We knew the platform was essentially in beta. We knew we'd be their largest customer. We naively believed that meant they'd be motivated to get it right.

They were not.

Leading up to go-live, we raised concern after concern with the Workmate team. Their response? A $25,000 consulting proposal to build custom features and handle a migration that their product should have been able to do out of the box. Twenty-five thousand dollars, on top of the subscription (which we prepaid the annual cost of in advance) to make their own software functional to a business of our size. We declined. We told them our only expectation was that they run their SaaS product as advertised and provide basic customer support. Apparently, that was too much to ask.

Our internal team handled the entire migration ourselves with little to no help from Workmate. We were live in days. And that's when the real nightmare began.

The tools didn't work. Not "had some quirks." Did not work. Purchase orders/Special orders were riddled with errors. Inventory failed to update in Shopify silently, with no warnings, no error messages, just wrong data flowing into our systems. Costs were missing or flat-out incorrect. POs showed inconsistencies that nobody at Workmate could explain. Every piece of data that touched Workmate came out the other side corrupted. This wasn't a rough edge on an otherwise solid product. This was a fundamentally broken tool being sold as production-ready software.

We spent six to eight weeks flagging issue after issue. We documented everything. We were clear, specific, and patient. The Workmate team would acknowledge the problems, they couldn't deny them, but they could not commit to fixing them. They couldn't even commit to timelines for fixing them. And the few timelines they did give, they missed every single one. They'd push a minor tweak here and there, just enough to look like they were trying, while the critical issues that were actively damaging our business went completely unresolved.

We finally pulled the plug and migrated to Shopify's native tools and other existing apps. It was the decision we should have made months earlier.

What Workmate left behind was a disaster. Weeks of cleanup. Significant resources now being spent auditing inventory data, reconciling costs, and repairing records that Workmate corrupted. We are still dealing with the fallout today, still finding bad data, still fixing records, still paying for the damage this product did to our business (2 weeks after pulling the plug). The impact on our data integrity was not theoretical. It was massive, measurable, and ongoing. Had we gone on longer than we did, it would have done a dangerous amount of damage to our small business.

We went into this as willing, communicative, patient partners. We flagged problems early. We gave every benefit of the doubt. We stayed weeks longer than any reasonable business should have. None of it mattered.

Here's the bottom line: Workmate (Teifi Digital) is a consulting firm trying to sell a SaaS product. They don't seem to know which business they're actually in, and the result is a tool that isn't ready for a single real-world customer, let alone an operation of our size. If you do need their help while using their SAAS tool, Workmate, they will turn into a consulting firm and offer assistance at a price. If you reject, you will be deprioritized. The fact that Shopify is actively promoting this product through official webinars to an entire industry is irresponsible and something that needs to be seriously reviewed. Shopify is lending its credibility to a product that will damage your business.

Save yourself the months of pain and the cleanup costs. Look elsewhere.

The team at Workmate has been so incredibly helpful. As a brand we do a ton of repairs and warranty replacements for our bikes, and until Workmate came along there was not a good solution in the Shopify ecosystem. We were using Lightspeed to manage workorders, and while their workorder feature worked fine, it also added unnecessary operational complexity with another system to manage (inventory, payouts, receivables, etc.). Workmate solved that problem for us. Additionally, their team is very supportive, responsive, and they are consistently adding more features

Workmate first reached out to us last Fall. After having a session with someone and explaining our needs, we waited and waited for a response and didn’t hear anything, despite reaching out a few times. We realize that our needs are unique, but the salesperson promised to look into it and get back to us.

Come last month, I was really at my wits end with Lightspeed and thought I would reach out to see if the platform might be viable and if the drop in contact was an “oops”. It wasn’t. We have continued to find that your support team is not consistently responsive, sometimes taking over a week to respond, if at all.

That is just not the kind of company we want to work with. Especially during the set up process, it is important that we are able to get all of our questions answered to make sure that the product will work for us. We still don’t know if it will or will not, but I’m not willing to continue waiting for inconsistent customer service.

Updated February 14: Workmate reached out to us about a week ago with a very sincere apology and commitment to working with us if we were interested. We have taken them up on their offer and they have been much more responsive. We hope this trend continues and I will continue to post updates here.