I had been using eJunkie for the 5 years prior to moving to SendOwl. eJunkie is a dead platform by all means, with no new development taking place for the past several years. All they have done in past 7 years is to create a new HTML 5 based admin panel, which too looked outdated on the day it was launched. However, to eJunkie's credit, the platform is super stable, the support staff very technical, and I hardly faced any issues during those 5 years. So, why did I switch, you might ask.
The first and biggest reason to switch to SendOwl was a bug in eJunkie platform where some affiliate orders were missing critical information in their IPN notification. This was causing my order workflow to break. eJunkie didn't have any developers onboard to investigate the issue. Second reason was Stripe integration. I was fed up with PayPal and wanted to try Stripe. Third reason was a need to get on to a more modern eCommerce platform. eJunkie looks stale by all means. SendOwl met all my main criteria, was within my budget, and looked modern at first glance (when compared to the antiquated eJunkie anyway). I did evaluate couple other options but they didn't satisfy some or other requirements. So I decided to go with SendOwl.
Here's a compilation of just some of the issues I faced with SendOwl. I've more on the list and would post them in the next instalment.
- The thing I disliked the most about SendOwl is that they do not have a public forum for their customers to ask questions. Such forums serve as a knowledge base for new customers and can be a huge help during onboarding. In my 5 years with eJunkie, I contacted them fewer than 5 times. That's not because I didn't have issues or questions. It's because 95% of the questions or issues were addressed by reading the posts on their public forum. But in my first 2 weeks with SendOwl, I had to contact them about 20 times. For every little thing, you have to write to the SendOwl support. Their help pages only provide basic information and you need to contact their support at every step along the way.
- Moreover, it's also an issue of transparency. When a customer has issues, the company is not providing any channel to voice out the concerns. They claim to have thousands of customers, but if you visit their blog, it's a complete monologue. There's hardly any engagement with the customers. They do not have any significant presence on any of the social media platforms.
- Quality of support is mediocre. The only support staff person they have is a non-technical person. It invariably takes 3-4 emails just for him to understand a simple issue. When that person is not around, the owner takes over and things move slightly faster until they hit a deadend. Once the issue is established to be a shortcoming or bug in their platform, the discussion ends with this standard response - "That's how it works now. We have an item to change behaviour or fix it in the future but it's on our backlog of work so I can't confirm the time right now. Until then I'm afraid you'll have to live with the current system (or move to another provider)."
- I had an extremely frustrating experience at onboarding itself. I had a problem integrating their Add to Cart / View Cart buttons on my website. When I requested their help, they simply gave up and said they do not know how to resolve it. Any self respecting programmer would not give up so easily. I had to download their scripts and debug them to finally understand and resolve the issue on my own. The issue dragged on for several days. Anyone with the knowledge of the script could have resolved the issue in 5 mins. That should have served as a red flag and but I failed to acknowledge it at that stage.
- They do no seem to use any CRM system that can provide a unique ticket number for each issue. All issues are handled through emails with no unique identifier.
- I use the service to sell eLearning subscriptions and offer downloadable PDF files with the subscription purchase. I use the PDF stamping feature. Once or twice, the download link failed to work. Other than that, configuring PDF stamping was not an issue and it has been working pretty well. Overall, this is an improvement over eJunkie's service.
- They do not support product variants. You can use bundles as a workaround, but it's extremely painful to set bundles to be variants. Even if you have a small business with 10 products with 5 variants each, you'll have to setup 10 base products and 50 bundles (one for each variant). So, now instead of managing 10 products, you are managing 60 (10 + 50).
- The admin panel interface is poorly designed. It requires too many clicks to find a product or bundle once you have more than couple dozen products and bundles, and in generally confusing to navigate around.
- Integration with Stripe is broken. As I mentioned above, Stripe was the biggest driver for me when opting for SendOwl. Stripe generates really nice receipts, but due to the broken interface, those receipts are not sent to the customer. What's sent is an ugly text-only receipt from SendOwl to my customers.
- There's no option to disable certain type of emails. The default receipt that is sent from the SendOwl system looks ugly and unprofessional. I requested to have their receipt disabled because a receipt is sent by the payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe by default, and it doesn't make any sense sending 2 receipts to the same customer. eJunkie had a simply switch to turn off their receipt. However, I couldn't win this battle with SendOwl owner. First they plain lied to me that it was a requirement imposed on them from the payment gateways. I checked with both PayPal and Stripe (the two gateways that I use), and both denied imposing any such requirement. When I confronted SendOwl with this information, they said it's a legal requirement in some countries to issue receipts to the customers. I countered saying that I'm the merchant and my payment gateway is issuing the receipt to my customers. SendOwl is a non-entity as far as my customers are concerned and I do not want to confuse my customers by sending them an email from sendowl.com, a domain that they do not recognize. But he refused to budge and I'm still living with that problem.
- The coupon code implementation is horrible. eJunkie's implementation far excelled.
- Three months ago, I enquired whether there's a feature to hide the coupon code field on the shopping cart. eJunkie had this feature (to show/hide coupon codes from cart). I was told that as long as there's at least one valid coupon code on the account, the field would appear on the cart. I waited for another month to let all my coupon codes expire. When all coupons had expired and the field still showed up, I was told that as long as there's any code on the account (even if they are expired / used up), the field will show up on the cart. To hide the coupon code field, I would have to delete all the codes from the account (and lose the history in the process). Again I was told to look for another provider if that was a problem.
- This week I discovered that once a coupon code is applied to a cart, even if the customer cancels the checkout, it's considered consumed. So, if you have issued a single use coupon code to a customer, then it becomes useless. Moreover, to add to the confusion, in the admin panel it will still show such (consumed) coupons as Active.
- The affiliate management system is pretty rudimentary and has several problems. I particularly do not like the heavy-handed approach they take for the affiliate management. The affiliate relationship is between the affiliate and the merchant. The merchant should have full control over how they manage their affiliates. The system should be the enabler and shouldn't interfere or take decisions on behalf of the merchants. Apparently, SendOwl owner has a different approach - he wants to be the policeman and ensure that things are done right according to the standards that he sets for everyone. All the following were non-issues with eJunkie.
- You cannot join your own affiliate program even if you want to do so just for testing the features (because their owner doesn't think it's right).
- If you issue a partial refund, the entire affiliate commission on that order is rolled back (it should be pro-rated by default). You have to manually reconcile such issues at the end of the month.
- If you even make a minor change to a product, it triggers mass emails to all the affiliates without any warning whatsoever.
- Reports have several issues too.
- The full order report doesn't know the name of the affiliate for orders coming through affiliates. You have to run multiple reports and manually reconcile the information every month. It was a breeze with eJunkie.
- The monthly affiliate commission reports that are sent out to affiliates often show the wrong commission payable to affiliates. It's a shame that a task as basic as calculating monthly affiliate payout accurately is not handled well by their system.
- Reports do not show a total summary. You need to download the csv file, open it in Excel and calculate the total.
- WebHooks SHA verification header was changed without notice causing all my transactions to fail. After breaking my head with the support for several hours, they finally acknowledged that they had changed the request SHA request headers but were absolutely unapologetic.
- I started receiving duplicate order receipts were sent once. This issue was resolved after I managed to win a long battle with their owner that some merchants (if not all) do not want duplicate receipts.
- While setting up my account, I added T&Cs to be shown to my customers. Next day, all of it disappeared with no trace. They could not give me any reasonable justification.
- I found a user interface issue where the checkout page was not redirecting back to merchant site properly. This issue was fixed by them.
- The shopping cart was not visible at all on iPad. Such a huge issue, and their response was that it's Apple's (iOS) problem not theirs, so they won't fix it. Finally, after I pressurized them, they finally fixed it.
- Account password reset workflow is broken. You need to write to support to get your password reset.
- PayPal - return to merchant site link is broken.
- For products on which qty cannot be more than 1, the qty field should be completely hidden.
- When cart is opened in a new window, it has a Close X button, but the button doesn't actually work (confusing UI).
I'm extremely dissatisfied with SendOwl's service. I would probably rate is 2 out of 5. It promises a lot but fails to deliver on several counts. It has been extremely frustrating 4 months with them. I'm looking forward to jump the ship at the next available opportunity. If you have experience (good or bad) with SendOwl's service, please post your comments below. If you have other questions, comments or suggestions for me about other eCommerce platforms, please share them too.
