The GOOD and the BAD……the promise is there, the execution…..

The GOOD > offers startup’s a low cost entry into transactional SMTP and Mail Marketing/Remarketing. The customer support side is relatively good and usually receives a response within 1 working day, a maximum of 2, on average. The mail marketing tools, customer lists and generally all the tools their platform provides for Marketing purposes are useful for a small business.

The BAD > the transactional SMTP functionality is unreliable, even when connected via an API key, so much so that one has to look at the Woo Orders page daily to reconcile orders that did not reach the Sales Inbox. This usually occurs for two reasons 1.) The New Order Email did not send out of WP via Brevo SMTP (there are no logs available through the Brevo SMTP Plugin or their platform to troubleshoot this, so it’s a total mystery. 2.) Their low-cost entry offering uses shared IP addresses for transactional emails, which since summer of 2023 have been under attack by scammers, causing the public IP’s to be blacklisted on Spamcop, thus causing Softfails (e.g. email is sent out from WP, but does not reach the Sales mailbox due to their infrastructure shared IP’s being blocked for sending out spam emails.

As you can imagine, the BAD is debilitating for a small business, because 1.) didn’t occur when Brevo was used via a third party such as the WP SMTP plugin and 2.) Unless you fork out ￡150 per annum for a dedicated static IP, you cannot guarantee email deliverability to your sales mailbox to process orders, thus potentially not processing orders, shipping late, and generally ruining your business in a hurry. The process of onboarding accounts should be tightened to stop scammers from using the platform for malicious purposes, thus costing every other legitimate user on the same infrastructure operational issues.

At the time of writing, during Jan and Feb 2024, the Soft Fail emails through their platform were in the 20% range of all transactional emails sent, all because their platform’s public IPs are being blacklisted because of a few bad apples on their platform.

So much promise but so frustrating and such a drain on labour resource to have to manually reconcile everything in the past 6+ months. If it lasts, we may have to look to alternatives.