Recharge Subscriptions App

We started using ReCharge over a year ago, because at the time it seemed to be the best app for subscriptions. Since then, they don't seem to have made any real progress, but have introduced some really bad bugs. In the meantime, other apps like Recurrly seem to have made great strides (A year ago we went with ReCharge over Recurrly).

Pressing issues today include the app not loading for weeks at a time from the Shopify store, so you literally cannot use the app!

Janky scripting issues with notifications and inability to make notification changes in many cases.

Even things as simple as sending their invoices are not simple. Invoice notifications are links to help pages to help you figure out how to find them instead of just including in the invoice email like, well...., every other company.

We will switch at some point here, but for now just highly recommend you check out an alternative. It seems like Recurrly is really on top of it. Until ReCharge is able to hire a product manager, I highly recommend you avoid them.

Update 1/10: Same issues still persists meaning I have to email them every month before recurring charges go through to get support to fix it. And now that they make you pay more each month to get better support, especially if they are urgent?!
————
Update: I was finally able to get in touch with a helpful support and he (Trevor) was very great about communicating the problems and helping me escalate the issues to resolve them. I wish I can give 5 stars but the app definitely has its problems. Apparently I got a "rare edge case" that can only be resolved when I contact support and it can take a couple day to resolve the issue. I really hope there's a better support system like live chat or call so that urgent issues can be resolved faster.
------------
Terrible app. Nothing works correctly. Keeps getting error every single month when it's time to automatically process charge. Support does not help - they are unfamiliar with their own app as well.

UPDATE 25OCT20 - WARNING! DO NOT USE RECHARGE THEME ENGINE! (we're over a $500k store) This is NOT a turnkey solution to a custom checkout portal. We attempted to use it because on the surface it looks great. That's where it ends. It completely disconnects ALL your third party integrations, even the ones that work with recharge. Gorgias, one of the biggest customer service integrations, has all links broken when you update. Customer portal cancel and reactivation buttons do not work...so your customers can't cancel their account. Imagine how bad this makes a brand look. Here's their response:
"Hi Dan, Tarek here from the Customer Success team at ReCharge, thanks for reaching out. I understand your frustration here, these issues that pop up here and there definitely cause for a less than ideal experience. Our developers are consistently working hard to upgrade the app and the merchant/customer experience. This year might seem especially troublesome because of the number of updates we're pushing through on our app to improve it - we've been constantly releasing new features and monitoring them for feedback. Our Novum theme is still in its Beta phase and we're still constantly upgrading it and implementing workarounds and fixes. The links from Gorgias breaking is a known issue that our developers are working on integrating correctly. Novum, by design, uses tokens every time a customer navigates and logs into their portal for better security. These tokens are not translated into links in Gorgias, which does not account for customer tokens in the URL and doesn't append the portal URL with tokens. As such, our current integration with Gorgias does not work with our Beta version of Novum. The cancelation and reactivation buttons should not be erroring out, they should be working. I can jump in and troubleshoot this for you but I will need you to send me the name of a test customer I can try to activate/cancel subscriptions on to replicate the error. Given the Gorgias links do not work with Novum yet, you might not wish to activate it even if these buttons work. I understand that you've been frustrated with your ReCharge experience recently - any feedback you can offer us here would be helpful and appreciated, and I can send your comments up to our leadership team as well. Kindly,
Tarek A.
ReCharge Customer Success" Absolutely ridiculous. Shopify will be coming out with its own subscription option soon and it couldn't come soon enough. UPDATE 7SEP20 - NEW ALMOST DAILY ISSUES
- Don't bother creating discount codes for email campaigns because Recharge won't track them. When we emailed support they said it was a glitch and they were working on it...that was beginning of July. Be sure to check the "apply discount" in your current subscribers portal. We've had Recharge toggle it off 4 times in the last two weeks...Their response "clear your cache." Their responses are laughable at this point. We've cleared our cache and the issue continues. Extremely unethical business practices by Recharge. Luckily Shopify is coming out with its own subscription option. As much as I want to always champion businesses, I can't with recharge and I hope Shopify leads Recharge to be phased out. It's been nothing but issues over the past three years. UPDATE 25JUN20 - ISSUE'S STILL UNRESOLVED / RECHARGE PRO The issues below have yet to be resolved. Recharge Pro, $300 + $.20 PER TRANSACTION. The basic plan is $39.99 and $.5 per transaction. This is obnoxious per transaction fee. They will tell you it's due to all the advanced features but come on now. The support is subpar and the bugs throughout recharge don't justify you taking 19 cents of EVERY DOLLAR EARNED. Please do your research prior to onboarding recharge. It's fine for small stores but for large volume stores like ours, it's a mess. UPDATE 22JUN20 - NEW ISSUES
Well, Recharge is still a mess. If it's not one thing it's another. They're more apt to blame Shopify and you as the store owner attempt to reach out to Shopify for info they can get as a developer. Unfortunately, there aren't many other options and Recharge knows this. So they honestly are in no rush to fix their app that's full of bugs and issues. 1. Discount codes still don't always work. Here are two examples. First, we sent out a code via our email list and it showed 0 uses, although there were over 50. This still hasn't updated and that was almost two months ago. Second, if a potential subscriber adds a free shipping discount code in the "apply code" section on the address page it will show $0.00, instead of the discounted shipping. This leads potential subscribers to believe the code doesn't work. The code will show up AFTER a potential subscriber clicks continue to the next page to enter their payment info. We are a high volume story, 6 figures, so we get several emails a day asking us why the code isn't working. Rather than find a solution, Recharge just says it needs Shopify to calculate rates. I can understand this but why have a code say $0? It's your app Recharge so maybe it's time to take a little accountability. Recharge has to be one of the worst apps on Shopify. Don't be fooled by the number of reviews and stores that use them. There are CONSTANT errors with their systems. Example 1: they have a "beta" test for snapshot reports. This is where you see how many subscribers you have, sales, etc. They can't get that right so the info is always incorrect and they tell you to download a spreadsheet. I shouldn't have to do that to see basic insights. Example 2: I'm not able to access the recharge app on my iPhone X. Are you kidding me? One of the most popular phones in the world and it's not compatible. This was reported to recharge on Sept 13, 2019. Here was their response (this issue has yet to be resolved nor have I received any further emails about an ETA: "I'm sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I heard back from our development team, and the issue lies in the way the app is opened by Shopify - we've observed that the issue relates to the fact that the app is open in an iFrame, so our development team has been investigating ways of turning the iFrame off. While this is on their backlog, I'm afraid we don't have an ETA for a definitive fix yet." Example 3, discount codes will randomly not work (yes they've been set up and tested correctly). We have to find out from potential subscribers through IG or email that they aren't working. Good luck getting a timely response from Recharge. Example 4, you can get expedited customer service...FOR ALMOST $200 EXTRA A MONTH. So you want me to pay more to get in contact with you when your app is a disaster? Example 5: Your subscribers will be randomly charged (and sometimes not at all without prompting the recharge staff) throughout the day you choose rather than all at once. Why they don't do batch charging like other companies is beyond me. I have no idea why Shopify doesn't create its own app. We'll be 100% looking for another provider after recharge failing us for the last 3 years. (I'll continue to update this review as the problems continue to stack up).

I dowloaded the app and instantly my entire site stopped working and I lost a few thousands dollars in sales while is scrambled to figure out the problem. The support team was slow and refused to call me and didn't help at all. Luckily I was able to activate an old theme but it was a huge fiasco for my company. Be VERY careful with this app. If they screw you they wont help you

ReCharge is unreliable, and their support is nonexistent when you need it. They update the software without warning, and it triggers glitches that don’t have easy solves. Customer support is slow if they answer at all. My developers updated the price of one item in my store today and ReCharge stopped working altogether. It shows all subscription items as "out of stock" which is costing us thousands of dollars. So far it's been twelve hours and they haven't responded to our urgent plea for help. The cost to my business and our customers is too high to keep using this app.

Read this review!

This app is VERY slow and the backend and customer facing UI are both absolutely terrible to work with.

Any changes to subscriptions take forever to process in the backend -- so if you have a subscription business where customers will be subscribed to many items, prepare to waste a lot of time staring at the screen waiting for this app to process it.

The same is true for the customer UI -- it also doesn't provide a way for customers to actually see the total of their upcoming subscriptions so if you have taxes, shipping, discounts applied, etc. they have no visibility into this and it causes a lot of customer service.

They also require you to pay a premium for different levels of customer service, including paying a premium to access the API which is needed for most customization.

Not sure how this app has made it as far as it has. If you have a small hobby business then it's probably a good solution for you but it completely misses the mark on being useful at scale due to it's slow, slow interface and the need to customize the customer interface for it to be usable.

We have a problem and support will not answer! This is not acceptable. They take two days to answer and charge more for premium support.

The customer service aligned with this integration, HORRIBLE so far. NOT personable AT ALL, and not very knowledgable either. We've been trying to 'activate' our account for going on THREE weeks. Numerous customers reaching out due to 'declined cards', payments not being processed to our bank accounts.

Very hard to install and does not give you option to test system. Also it says free until you reach $100,000 in sales but it charge you a subscription of $30.00. After following all the steps, it does not work.

App won't move past the setup page. Wasted half an hour trying to do ANYTHING. So I will be moving on.