Recharge Subscriptions App

This was a terrible experience. The customer service team was responsive but the app is poorly designed. The situation turned into a nightmare when the ReCharge team edited our live site instead of test theme (despite our explicit instructions not to do this).

I would skip this app and go with a service that understands the need for a strict separation between a sandbox and live site.

I hate the fact that I cannot have it billed through Shopify, but instead I have to manage a separate subscription. Utterly pointless and unnecessary!

Don't recommend paying extra for the pro version. They market it to you as having an even higher level of customer service. That is false. Since we've upgraded our account, our customers have been unable to login to their accounts or update their payment info. This has been going on for TWO WEEKS now. Recharge just keeps saying they are escalating the ticket with no resolution in site. Unbelievably frustrating.

UPDATE: 2/12/20

I wish I could update this review with positive info, but if anything, their support has got WORSE. Not only that, but now they want to charge you extra for priority support.
We are currently 5 DAYS into a major bug brought to light by one of our customers. A discount code was supposed to apply to a customer's first 3 charges, but is only applying to 1.
Two days ago, they tried blaming us for "Fully Disabling" the code although we provided a screen shot that the code was simply made Inactive (per their support site documentation) to allow it to continue to work for existing subscriptions, but no new subscriptions past the offer date.
(BTW it takes them a full 24 hours to respond to you, even if its useless info).
Today we get an email claiming that the customer didn't use the code in question and used a code that has been disabled for almost a year.
We gladly provided screen shots ONCE AGAIN showing that the service rep is providing inaccurate information and now wasting another 24 hours.
Mean while we have several hundred customers that used this code and whose subscriptions are running without the code being applied.

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With the pricing they charge, I'm not sure what they spend their development time on...

From Migration:
You send them a file with fields mapped, but you are responsible for everything. What I mean by this is they do not report any errors or potential errors back, its on you to export what they imported in and check it against what you sent them.
The other issue is that we migrated from another platform that allowed customers to have more than 1 card vaulted. ReCharge would only allow us to use a customer ID and pulled the "Default" card on the customer record. We had to go through 3000+ customer records manually to make sure the card on file for their subscription was set to their "Default" card. A better solution would have been for ReCharge to allow the unique token id that referenced the customer and the exact card they were using.
Another issue we had was with the frequency, but some of that I'll take the blame for. We switched from offering every Month or every other Month as shipping frequency options. We setup 30 Days or 60 Days. Instead of being able to map those during import, ReCharge imported as is. While this did not affect orders from processing correctly, it did cause an issue when customers try to edit that frequency. Since they didn't write their code to handle both frequency (30, 60, 90 etc) and interval (days, months, etc) my customers are presented with the option of 30 or 60 MONTHS, yes MONTHS when they try to change their frequency. I've since been able to fix by exporting all our subscriptions, editing the frequency and interval manually and having them re-import.

ISSUES WITH DISCOUNTS:
For whatever reason ReCharge has discounts, but they didn't set it up to handle the basic logic that Shopify does. So you can't setup discounts like:
1) Fixed $ amount or % off an order
2) discounts off specific products/variants
3) BUY X GET Y

It only lets you set % and $ off ALL PRODUCTS in your cart, as specific product (yes, a SINGLE product...apparently they forgot what multiselect is), or a specific collection. While some people might not mind creating a collection for every single discount they setup in ReCharge, a collection still does not get you the option to exclude/include specific variants.

ISSUES WITH TAXES:
While ReCharge does seem to read products to see if they are taxable, they didn't think it important enough to read the customer record to see if they are tax exempt or not. So we currently have hundreds of customers screaming at us that we are charging them sales tax even though they are tax exempt. ReCharge's suggestion: "A lot of our customers just give the customer a discount." Yes, because I'm sure the IRS will take the excuse: "Oh yes, I know our accounting software is showing we collected all that money in taxes, but it really wasn't taxes, we gave a discount. You see?" What could possibly go wrong?

Worst customer service support and such a confusing app to use. Looking for another solution. I cannot see my rulesets and customer service takes two days to get back and every message you send back to them will need two days to respond. Absolute joke of an app. I lost so many customers as the recharge app was telling my customers i had no stock.

One of the worst app experiences I've ever had in my 5 years on Shopify. Over 1 year of back & forth emails waiting days to hear back and ultimately get no where. :-(

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?!
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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.
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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