Worse than useless – fraudulent and a waste of time with amazing incompetence

I can’t find any use for this plugin or for mailchimp. If it were free, it would not be worth it. My lost productivity and damage to estore reputation by using mailchimp costs much more than the not cheap price i’m paying to send completely unreliable bulk emails. Glancing at the reviews, i find a good portion that echo my nightmare experience and a lot of reviews that who’s validity is extremely suspect. I would not be surprised if mailchimp is fraudulently padding reviews.

Taking a brief look at my mailchimp contacts (that should only be from Woocommerce, and according to mailchimp’s own dashboard are 100% from Woocommerce) HOWEVER, the vast majority of email “contacts” in mailchimp do not exist in Woocommerce (“no data found” when i query the email address in woocommerce). Possibly worse is the fact that only a small percentage of my Woocommerce customers end up in the mailchimp contacts (both the subscribed and non-subscribed only total <30% of last months new customers). To make matters worse, mailchimps “customer service” is non-existant – wait for long periods only to eventually chat with somebody who somehow knows even less about mailchimp than i do. They “customer service” does not read the messages, but, bot-like spews useless irrelevent links, and when they do reply to a question, it is clear that they have no idea about how mailchimp works. I feel cheated and have wasted a fair bit of time. Dodgy AF.

To update: i filed a ticket when i noticed that the reported revenue on campaigns was counting each single order 2 or 3 times and also counting orders place years before the email as campaign revenue. The respsonse from mailchimp was first to say “that has nothing to do with mailchimp”. Then i received an email saying their automatic system for detecting abuse has ended our account due to violation of #18 on terms of use (with link). There was no #18 in the link and when i read the terms of use we of course used none of them. So then mailchimp, after many many emails of denying that double or triple=counting each order as campaign revenue, FINALLY look at it and discovered that orders from our live site were counted, then orders from a staging site (the same order) counted again, then orders from an now-defunct staging site counted yet a third time. So i disconnected the staging site from my mailchimp account, which had the effect of DELETING ALL CAMPAIGNS. I’ve now been waiting days again for ANY reply from mailchimp on any of this.

The list of incompetencies and brokeness at mailchimp which has cost me days of lost productivity and brand reputation goes on and on. I set a campaign to send to ADRESS [NOT EQUAL] USA so i can offer different content to USA customers and non-USA customers. In the mailchimp report for ADRESS NOT EQUAL USA over 79% of email recipients were located in USA. Tried 3 times filing ticket about this with zero reply over weeks.

Using ADRESS [Is Not] USA for one email version and ADRESS [IS] USA by definitition should include all of our contacts. It doesn’t come close. In speaking with mailchimp support about this (2 years ago) i was finally able to convince one of their monkeys that those 2 conditions should normally represent our entire audience. The reply: we’ll look into and get back to you. 2 years later with multiple follow-up inquiries all unanswered…

Update: while looking for a replacement for mailchimp, our store was disconnected from the mailchimp account. Again, hours wasted with support that kept repeating the same instructions for re-connecting the store. As usual, the instructions did not work and the store was not connected. After going through this same useless cycle with 2 separate clueless “support” agents i gave up. I was contacted several days later to ask if they could close the ticket. I told them it was in no way resolved and the process started all over with somebody who had obviously not read or understood the issue and referred me to the exact same instructions that already failed 3 times.

Before sending my final mailchimp email and moving on from this nightmare, i decided that i better check the segments i had created so that contacts with canadian addresses receive a different email than contacts with USA addresses. Sure enough, the first contact in the [Address IS (includes) USA] is Rocky Mountain House, AB T4T 1V4 Canada. Definitely NOT USA and and exactly an address that i want to exclude from receiving the USA version of the email. Here is what support told me when i asked why addresses like this were included in the segment Address IS (includes) USA: “So, Canada is technically not apart of the US so that’s why it’s populating. You’d have to add another filter for addresses that do not contain Canada. Is there anything else i can help you with”

I extremely regret the time wasted with mailchimp in which every function it offers is completely broken and when one can, after trying repeatedly to get support, “support” sends a copy paste email indicating nobody read the initial question and stops responding, maybe to close your account. Please find some more serious provider rather than deal with these fraudsters.

• This topic was modified 4 months, 4 weeks ago by jeremywendell.
• This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by jeremywendell. Reason: mailchimp's list of incompetencies is extremely long and growing at an accelerating rate. NOTHING works