Route ‑ Protection & Tracking

Absolute rip off. My customer received her crystal which was damaged in transit at the tip. They claim it is only "cosmetic" because the item is still usable but that would mean any of my crystals technically would never be covered as all of the damage would be "cosmetic." Now my customer has paid for a service and they are being ripped off since Route won't cover it. Personally I feel like this is a big oversight on their part. Not all items damage the same way. Be cautious when downloading this and helping your customers be ripped off. NEW EDIT: as you can see in their answer below they did resolve my orignal issue but that is because I threatened to call the BBB on them, not out of the goodness of their heart. Damage is damage even if it is just a chip so their policies allow them to accept or deny claims at their discretion and I am assuming its usually denied. I cancelled them on my shop because they have changed a lot of their policies including that if a package is marked as stolen customers may have to file a report with the police. I have a lot of black customers and I would NEVER ask them to make contact with the police for something as little and stupid as a lost package when Shipsurance does not require this. I also just had an international customer have their claim denied which I am currently trying to dispute. He thought it was lost in customs so waited to file a claim in the hopes it would arrive and now they have denied him saying he waited too long. With COVID and extended wait times for international shipments it seems like AGAIN they just do not want to pay out for services they have been paid for. Absolutely don't deal with these people. They are a total rip off. Second edit: They will not cover my international shipment that was lost in transit. If I had insured it through Shipsurance for $0.70 I would have not had to pay out over $100 to my customer who spent THEIR OWN money on Route's product.

This review is for both the Route app and one of their sales team members. I received a series of offensive emails from one of the reps. Their lack of professionalism reflects poorly not only on them but more importantly the company and platform. I hope other business owners do not have the same experience.

route only replaced 5 packages for us in the last 6 months, our out of pocket for replacements is still astronomical because route doesn't approve MOST claims. their app has been removed from the google play store and we have received constant customer complaints about their lack of service. this company is a scam and shouldn't be on the app store

It has helped customers feel more secure when ordering knowing their order is covered if lost/stolen

We have been using this service for a couple of months now. Almost every customer selects it at check out. BUT route denies every claim. So disappointing. This was supposed to help customers feel more secure about packages being protected but this app is such a letdown. We will be going back to our old insurance app.

App was great at the beginning as it solves the issue of items being stolen or lost and doesn't cost you anything. However it has become more and more difficult for customers to file claims or even get a response so I reached out for a customer... and waited... and waited... 8 days later they closed the request.... without responding to it!!!! Will be deleting the app and offering my customers shipping insurance a different way from now on.

Route made over $5,000 through my customers over the last 6 months (on top of anything they had to reimburse) but today I deleted the app. Guess 10k a year isn't important enough for them to answer their emails.

Simple setup and immediate results! Fantastic way to increase conversion rates and elevate our customer service offerings. A win - win.

Update: Changing our review from two stars to four. Route reached out with an apology and assured us that they have hired more customer service reps to help process the high number of claims they are receiving due to the pandemic. The errors from our previous claims have been corrected and new claims have been processed in a timely manner. It seems they have addressed their issues and are back to functioning normally.

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Before Covid this insurance was a dream come true for us, they took care of customer claims quickly and efficiently, saving us both time and lost revenue. However, since Covid customer claims are being processed incorrectly resulting in us having to cover the losses ourselves. We are disabling the app for now and hope Route is able to fix their issues and get back to running smoothly again!

5/12/2020

Update: I am updating our review to 4 stars based on Routes follow-up on the issues in our first review.

Part of our issue is that we didn't spend enough time getting to understand the claims process. Customers can file their own claim using the link in the Route confirmation email. Our customer encountered an error in this process. The screen on his mobile device froze and he could not process the claim. We were unaware that we can also process a claim on their behalf using the Route dashboard in Shopify Apps. As is the case with most unhappy customer experiences our anxiety about getting them taken care of quickly created a tense situation. If we had been more aware of our ability to assist in filing the claim we may not have been as frustrated with Routes initial slow response to the issue. Route did respond within a couple business days which I felt was unacceptable and is one of two things they need to fix. The second being the customer experience with filing a claim on their mobile device. I did ask to be made aware of what created this issue and that it has been resolved. I have not heard back.

Overall the Route App is solid. I don't agree with other reviews about the difficulty installing the code. It was easy for us and Route helped to get it completed in a timely basis.

The service itself is very popular. We sell high ticket goods and nearly all customers opt in to Route.

Route quickly paid the claim and initiated an order through Shopify on the customers behalf. They used a credit card on the system so FGI and the customer were made whole.

I would also like to know more about what is required in making a claim. And what Route does with the carrier in return. What happens to the damaged goods? Who pays to ship them back? How does a carrier receive feedback about damaged shipments so they can improve their ship service? But these are not high priority questions.

If Route continues to improve and the service continues to be popular we'll be along term happy customer.

Kevin Sullivan
CEO
Forever Green Indoors

5/2/2020

UPDATE: After escalating the claim to a number of people I received communication from a Route Executive and another individual who were both helpful and apologetic about the delayed responses to our customer. He offered the customer an option for a refund, or a replacement. The customer elected for a replacement and Route purchased the product on his behalf to settle the claim. This was our first experience with a claim, and although not ideal, it seems to have satisfied our customer so we are satisfied as well at this time. I moved the review up to 3 stars. And I will move it up again if we continue to experience positive improvement with the Route team. I now recommend Route again, with the caveat that it would be a good idea to discuss expectations of claim communication. I'm unsure if the issue our customer faced with the mobile app for making claims has been fixed. We'll do what we can to look in to that. It would have likely avoided much of this review.

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5/1/2020

Very disappointed with Route. I had high hopes with the service. Our customers were nearly unanimously selecting to pay for the extra coverage. Our first claim involved an unhappy customer who received a badly damaged product shipped by UPS. The customer was unable to file a claim with route. Repeated attempts to contact sales failed. Unsure if the people who sold us this are even working there now. Had some success with technical support connecting us with a product support person who sent a curt email that Route was experiencing "high volumes of claims due to Covid 19". I am really disappointed in Route and we've disabled it in our cart. If the matter is resolved I'll change this review. At this point I'd give it fewer than one star for the money they collected versus the service they have provided. Avoid this app.

Let me start by saying this is a super cool idea and I applaud Route for it. Its something that in concept would be a dream for our company so thanks for dreaming this up Route!!! We started using this App October of 2020, to be honest it felt a bit like a good used car salesperson was selling this to us and everything seemed WAY To good to be true, but we were promised no this is for real. We signed up and it worked amazing for first 2.5 months as insurance. That being said the "used car salesperson" who sold us went dark after we set it up, when we finally located them they got very defensive and seemed hurt that we called them out for not helping us after they sold us the service, and we had 100 percent no support or anyone to reach out to till we continued to be a real squeaky wheel and then were assigned a "Customer Success Manager" "Customer Success Manager" felt a bit like going to the orthodontist where everyone is SOOOO Nice, and has the most amazing teeth you have ever seen and you are like Is this real??? Well like a really good yoga teacher our "Customer Success Manager" was great at platitudes and making it clear they were soooo sorry for the issue and would get it taken care of right away....then would be on vacation for long stretches and not take care of anything... once they returned they would forget our companies issue and we would spend considerable time bringing them back up to speed (mind you this is during a pandemic when our company is short staffed and stressed out trying to make outdoor gear safely in our workshop) And our CSM at Route would get very stressed out that we were frustrated with needing to invest MORE OF OUR VALUABLE time into something we had already told them about. The more we worked with Route the more it almost felt like a needy Child who we were needing to discipline and help shape but at the same time had to tread lightly as to not make them feel bad or to cause them to much work cause then it derailed the whole conversation and things we needed done would not be able to get done. We have been in E commerce 17 years. And as a Small business our customers expect responses from us fast, over the time we have been in business we have seen customers go from a 24 hour email response being seen as fast to them needing it instant through text or chats. When we were sold Route as a solution to our Shipping customer service issues (which to anyone in E commerce we can all agree are lots of the questions we all handle daily) we expected to have quick and reliable customer service from Route as well since they were selling an e commerce experience. Anyone reading this in e commerce can predict when the most shipping is going to be happening and hence the most Customer service needs : ) Well a very large issue for us with Route was Dec - Jan of 2020 much of the Route Team was out getting rad (skiing and doing great things with Family) that I would have loved to be doing myself albeit there was a pandemic and I was stuck triaging to my customers why their claims where not getting processed and my questions to Route where getting auto responses of being out on vacation. While I applaud work life Balance not being able to balance your staffing needs and that is unacceptable, especially for a company to be selling a product to take customer service stress from small businesses and then not really follow through. As I was told my the used car salesperson in our initial sales person "E commerce never sleeps" I could not agree more and as a company servicing that sphere you should structure your claims and customer service people so there is always someone available to help customers 24-7 Late in 2020 Route also changed their terms of use policy very discretely and stopped reimbursing the merchant for the cost of shipping which is very large on our products. This was never publicly addresses in any emails to clients and just processed by changing their website page where they have their terms of use, when I asked about this our rep got very angry and said it was our fault for not paying attention to their terms of use changing. On top of this they also changed how they processed the claims, prior they would sit on them until approved then someone would reorder from route, on their route credit card and we would see a new order with a route billing address to know it was a claim, then without any notice (Aside from the aforementioned change of use policy page on their site) they started putting every claim through as they were filed and we would see an order come in but sometimes paid for other times not paid for, our team would ship an item assuming it was a new order or had been approved as the old route claims worked only to see the claim denied and not paid a week later. To keep training our team to watch for the changes in Route became to much to handle for us. I was told in March of 2021 that this changed back perhaps again so they are reimbursing shipping but honest I don't know anymore and got tired trying to keep up with these folks. Last straw was when we uncovered a glitch in Route. As of March 2021 we have put 1.5 months into working with them on it to have a response that they don't know what is going on. This glitch will overcharge clients double or more in the insurance on occasional orders so we see a $389 Route on one order charges $4.95 for insurance and then a customer reorders and sees insurance of $10.95 or so. I run my business by honestly and while I understood there may be a glitch will say Route did nothing to fix it or address this or to publicly admit there was a glitch to their customers. In fact again they threw this back at us (Actually our customers) for going to fast through checkout and that this was the only way they could replicate the issue and had bigger problems to fix than this, Literally this is what our CSM told us! So apparently its never routes issue, always someone else's fault, and oops don't give them real life feedback or they get their feelings hurt, and they own this huge business but don't have to take the same stress the rest of us business owners do cause, they don't want to? In the days of big tech, VC Capital etc as a USA Manufacturer of High Quality goods perhaps I am just Old School but if I had this much investor Money I would be racing to address these glitches before I continued to push my Used car salespersons to keep collecting more and more accounts, clearly there is not enough roots behind the growing tree above and its becoming more and more unstable. Giving 1 stars instead of 0 only because I do really think Route is onto something but needs to grow up and learn customer service and hard work but then could be a super awesome product and I hope someone with time makes their own shipping insurance company as its a great idea if you have the backbone behind it to support it. In closing I want to note Route has given incentives for others to give them good reviews and this I find dishonest and did not do, instead this is our real life experience