Sent hundreds of emails to customers without warning

Hello,

At the end of the initial wizard process, it asks you “Start the program” with a yes or no button.
By saying yes, you should expect the program to be started. There’s nowhere where it says “do you want to go on test mode ?”
Then, after the program is started, you process all the past orders from your customers. In there, there’s a notice that says it will give points for orders that pre-existed your loyalty system. Why wouldn’t it give points and rewards as it’s supposed to ?

Here, you’re downvoting our plugin because it didn’t behave the way you wanted, not because it lacks information.

I’m sorry but your response and lack of concern for my business is not acceptable.

You have no safeguards in place before emails are sent.
You have a plugin that forces you to set up a program to even view the settings which then means anything else you do may well trigger emails.

There may well be things I could have done differently but I have to say that after more than 10 years of working on WordPress on hundreds of websites and using thousands of plugins, I haven’t come across an issue like this.

I have come across bad plugins before that didn’t do what they said, but not one that at first glance seems quite well documented but after less than 5 mins into working with it, it causes a massive issue.

There are several obvious safeguards you can and should apply to your plugin. I would list them but I am to busy dealing with the fall out from the catastrophic problem your plugin has caused.

I should add, it isn’t just that every customer got an email but that they got one email for every order they ever placed.

This plugin has existed for 4 years now and nobody raised this issue before. So, until now, I have to say that we didn’t know that safeguards were needed.

If you have suggestions on Safeguards we can add, I would be happy to know them. Apart from adding more notices to say that processing past order can lead to a lot of rewards being generated if the program is live, what else can you think of ?

I’m sorry you have to deal with thousands of emails sent, but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point.

If customers received an email for each order placed, that means that, in your settings, a reward was generated for each order.
For example, if you’ve set that placing an order gives 10 points and that for 10 points, customers receive a 5% discount coupon, then yes, customers will receive a reward email for each order they placed.
But, if you set the reward to be points to use on cart, customers wouldn’t have received any email, since no rewards would’ve been generated.

Following your review, here’s what we’ll do :

• We will add a double confirmation button on the process past orders to make sure that users know the potential outcome.
• In the Pro Version, there’s also the possibility to enable/disable each email. We’ll move that in the free version and disable emails by default

Do you think of something else ?

I am sure these are good improvements for future users.

I question why anyone would want an email to be sent to every customer that has ordered in the past (one email for every order) just because you have run the retrospective apply process.

I was running this to see how many people would get rewards (and how many rewards each) in order to validate if the reward I had suggested was worth it. I was planning on running a number of scenarios of different types of reward option to see what was the best option – there was no expectation (or warning or documentation) that this was going to send emails, why would it do that?

Like I said earlier, customers received an email for every order because, in your settings, every order generated a reward.
If you had set $1 = 1 point and set a coupon reward at 1000 points, only customers who have spent more than $1000 in their orders would have received an email.

There are a lot of reasons why people want customers to receive an email with a reward when processing past orders.
For example, set a system where points are given for the first order placed and a get a reward for that. Processing old orders will send all these customers one email with a discount coupon to make them come back and discover the loyalty program.
That’s only one example among many others.

The plugin behave exactly like it was supposed to. Here, the emails issue came from multiple elements combined :
– You started the program
– It was set to give a reward for every order placed
– You processed all previous orders from all customers
– The process was run on a live website

We could not have predicted someone would do these exact actions in less than 5 minutes after installing the plugin. In fact, after 4 years and 5.000+ users, this is the first time it happened.
We’ll add more securities for future users, that’s all I can say.