Constant Contact for Ecommerce: Its Own Shopify App Is Rated 2.9, and That Is the Answer

The honest answer is that this is not the ecommerce choice in this category, and the clearest evidence for that is the vendor's own: its official Shopify app scores 2.9 out of 5 from 25 reviews , against Klaviyo's 4.7 from 3,362 on the same store.

That does not make it the wrong purchase for every store. It makes it the wrong purchase for a store whose marketing is driven by what shoppers do, and the right one for a particular kind of business that happens to sell things. This article is about telling those apart.

What the official app's score actually tells you

Twenty-five reviews is a small sample and its value is positional rather than statistical. The position is still informative.

The app is "Constant Contact: Email & SMS", published by developer Constant Contact, rated 2.9 from 25 reviews . On the same storefront, the category's depth leader holds 4.7 from 3,362, a hundred and thirty times the volume at nearly two points higher.

When we measured Klaviyo we found a clean gradient: 4.7 on Shopify, 3.22 on BigCommerce, 2.8 on WordPress.org, 1.6 on Trustpilot. The score fell as the integration became less native. Constant Contact inverts it: its best scores are the general-audience ones. 4.0 on Trustpilot from 2,093 reviews ^[10] and 4.67 on Google Play from 2,401 ^[11], and its worst are the platform integrations, 2.9 on Shopify and 2.6 on its own WordPress forms plugin from 107 ratings ^[12].

That is a coherent picture rather than a contradiction. The people who rate this product highly are small businesses doing broad marketing. The people who rate it poorly are merchants and developers wiring it into a storefront.

A second signal points the same way: at least three third-party Shopify apps exist whose only purpose is connecting a store to Constant Contact, one of them rated 4.3 from 30 reviews. Better than the official one. Somebody felt the need to build them.

## What Premium actually gives a store

The commerce features are real and they are all on the top tier.

Premium adds ecommerce automation templates and ecommerce segmentation as named capabilities, alongside dynamic content in email, unlimited custom automations and segments, revenue reporting, and Google Ads Manager with a one-off $500 Google Ads credit ^[2]. At $80 a month month-to-month, or $68 billed annually ^[2]. That is inexpensive for the list.

Standard, at $35, has none of the ecommerce items. It has three automation templates, ten segments, scheduled sends, subject-line A/B testing and resend to non-openers ^[2]. A store on Standard is running a newsletter, not a lifecycle programme.

So the ecommerce decision on this product is really a tier decision, and the honest framing is that you are choosing between $80 a month here and $20 a month for Klaviyo's entry email plan with considerably more commerce depth. Before Klaviyo's other five meters, which take a fully equipped account there to $220 a month.

What Premium does not have at any price is a customer data platform, a helpdesk, an AI agent handling shopper conversations, or any channel beyond email and SMS. Klaviyo runs six channels off one profile. For a store whose programme depends on browse and cart behaviour. That gap is the whole decision.

## The abandoned-cart detail that is genuinely good

One billing fact favours a store here more than it favours anyone else, and it is buried in a support article.

"Automated emails, such as Welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and automated email series, are excluded from the email send allowance and overage fee calculation" ^[4].

Abandoned-cart reminders are named explicitly, and they are excluded from the meter entirely. For a store, that is the highest-volume automated flow there is: it fires on behaviour, it fires often, and on this product it costs nothing against the allowance.

Put that beside the allowance itself, which is already the most generous published here: "10, 12, or 24 times the highest number of contacts in your contact pricing tier" ^[4], applied to the ceiling of your band rather than your list. A store with 9,000 customers on Premium gets 240,000 sends a month, the vendor's own worked figure, and its cart reminders do not touch that number.

The thing that does touch it is resend to non-openers, which is included in the allowance and which the vendor says cannot be forecast ^[4].

So the meter here is friendly to automated commerce flows and unfriendly to broadcast campaigns with resends. That is the opposite of how most of this category bills. It is worth knowing.

## The band problem is worse for a store

Every store has a historical customer list, and on this product importing it has a permanent price.

The rule: "Your pricing is based on the highest tiered number of active contacts you've had (0-500, 2501-5000, etc.), so if you go into a higher tier in your current month, your monthly subscription will reflect that going forward" ^[3]. No readable page describes a reduction.

A store connecting a Shopify account with four thousand historical customers to a four-hundred- contact subscription moves the band immediately and keeps it there. And unlike a charity's December spike, this is not seasonal. It is the normal condition of commerce, where the customer list only grows and most of it is dormant.

Two mitigations, both imperfect. Sync new customers rather than historical ones where the integration allows it, and ask support whether it does, because the vendor's own framing is one-directional bulk import: "Import your data using 300 integrations" ^[2]. And prune deliberately, on a schedule, because on this product list hygiene is a billing activity, the vendor confirms it from the other side: "Even if an email bounces, it still counts as a send" ^[4].

Then price the band you will actually occupy after a year of trading, and get that figure from support, because no page publishes any band above the first.

SMS for stores, and the two-country limit

SMS matters for commerce more than for most verticals, so the restrictions matter more too.

Eligibility first: "Our SMS marketing tools are only available to US customers (excluding Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) with a valid 9-digit Tax ID Number (TIN), or an Employer ID Number (EIN) for businesses assigned by the IRS" ^[5], plus Australian customers with an eleven-digit ABN. For a store anywhere else, the SMS column of the comparison table does not apply.

Pricing is Starting at $10 USD/mo. on Lite and Standard, with the first 500 messages included on Premium ^[2], and the add-on is priced independently of the email plan ^[5].

The arithmetic is the part that catches stores out, because the billed unit is the segment: "Number of text messages billed = (The number of text message segments X The number of contacts the text message is sent to) + The number of automated outgoing messages sent" ^[5]. A segment is "around 160 characters each, or 70 characters when using emoji" ^[5].

Commerce SMS is exactly the use case that breaks on that rule. A shipping notification with an order number, a tracking link and a brand emoji is easily three segments rather than one, so the same send to the same list bills three times over. The vendor's own examples make the point: 1,000 contacts and two 160-character messages is 2,000 billed messages; the same list with two 300-character messages is 6,000 ^[5].

Draft a real message and count its segments before choosing a tier. The vendor lets you use the full SMS editor without subscribing ^[6].

## Revenue reporting, and what it can and cannot tell you

Premium lists revenue reporting as a named capability ^[2], and for a store that is the number the whole subscription is judged on, so it is worth being precise about what sits behind it.

What we can establish: revenue reporting exists on Premium, Reporting is a named component on the vendor's public status page ^[19], and four of the fifty published incidents since June 2024 concern reporting specifically ^[19]. What we could not read is the methodology, the attribution window, whether it counts assisted conversions, or how it reconciles with the store's own analytics, because the features page served us a cookie-consent dialogue rather than its contents.

One documented discrepancy is worth carrying into any reporting conversation, because it is the vendor's own warning about its own numbers: "Resends are not included in the stats on the Reporting tab, so you should always refer to your account page to see your most accurate send count for the billing period" ^[4]. The sends that bill you and the sends that appear in your report are, by construction, different numbers.

For a store, the practical consequence is that this product's reporting is a directional instrument rather than a ledger. Reconcile against the storefront's own order data rather than against the email tool, and if attribution matters commercially, if you are justifying spend to somebody, establish the window with support in the onboarding session, which is included on every tier ^[2].

A store's twelve-month cost, priced out

One worked example, from published figures only.

An online store with 4,200 customers on its list, one person running marketing, abandoned-cart and welcome flows, a monthly newsletter and two seasonal promotions. Premium is the tier, because ecommerce automation and segmentation and revenue reporting are Premium-only ^[2]. At $80 a month month-to-month that is $960 a year, or $816 billed annually at the published fifteen percent ^[2].

The band is 2,501-5,000, whose price is not published anywhere we could read, so the figures above are the first band's and the real number is higher. That is the central unknown and the thing to get from support before paying.

The send allowance at 24x the 5,000 ceiling is 120,000 sends a month. A weekly newsletter to the whole list uses 16,800, and the cart and welcome flows cost nothing against the meter because automated email is excluded entirely ^[4]. There is no realistic path to the overage here.

Add SMS for a 1,200-contact opted-in list, two messages a month: at one segment each that is 2,400 billed messages, but a shipping notice with a link and an emoji runs to three segments, which makes it 7,200 ^[5]. The tier prices above the $10 entry are not published ^[2], so this line is the second unknown.

Two of five lines on this store's bill cannot be quoted from any page. That is the honest summary of pricing this product for commerce.

## When this is still the right choice for a store

Three situations, and they are more common than the Shopify score suggests.

Your store is one channel among several. If you also run events, sell tickets or memberships, post to social and buy ads, one subscription covering email, social posting and scheduling, a social ads manager, Google Ads Manager, SEO recommendations and "Host events, sell products, and take payments" on every tier ^[2] is a genuinely different proposition from a commerce email platform. A gallery, a studio, a winery, a venue with a merchandise table. These sell things without being ecommerce businesses.

Your list is stable and your programme is calendar-driven. If you send a monthly newsletter and two seasonal promotions rather than behavioural flows, the depth you would pay Klaviyo for sits unused.

You need a person on the phone. Live phone and chat support with marketing experts and live 1:1 onboarding are on the cheapest tier ^[2], and in the hundred-review corpus support splits 18 positive to 8 negative ^[10] — the only product in this category where it splits rather than condemns. For an owner-operator with nobody to delegate to, that is worth real money.

The migration arithmetic, if you are leaving

If the Shopify score has decided it for you, three costs belong in the comparison beyond the monthly price.

The list structure does not travel. The vendor distinguishes lists, tags and segments, documented by list size ^[8], and an export carries contacts and fields rather than the logic that assigned them ^[9]. Rebuilding behavioural segments on the destination is the part people underestimate.

Deliverability resets. Moving platforms moves you to sending infrastructure your customers' providers have not seen you on, and the warm-up period is real. On this product that has a billing edge too, since bounces count as sends ^[4].

And what you stop having. If events, social scheduling or ads management were doing work inside one subscription, each becomes a line item plus a login plus somebody's time.

Set against a $60-a-month saving, those three usually consume two or three months of it. That is not an argument against migrating; it is an argument for pricing the move properly.

## The short version

The vendor's own Shopify app is rated 2.9 from 25 reviews against Klaviyo's 4.7 from 3,362, and that inverts the ratings-by-nativeness pattern — this product's best scores are its general-audience ones and its worst are its platform integrations.

Commerce features exist only on Premium at $80 a month: ecommerce automation and segmentation, dynamic content, revenue reporting, Google Ads Manager and a $500 ads credit. Standard has none of them.

One billing fact genuinely favours stores: abandoned-cart reminders are named as excluded from the send allowance entirely, and the allowance is the most generous published in this category.

One works against them: the contact band is your highest-ever count, and a store's customer list only grows. Importing order history moves your price permanently by the published rule.

Buy it if your store is one channel among several and your programme runs on a calendar. Buy Klaviyo if your programme runs on behaviour — and budget it at its stack price, not its $20 entry.

One last test that settles it faster than any feature comparison. Open your own storefront analytics and ask what share of last quarter's email revenue came from behavioural triggers — browse abandonment, cart recovery, post-purchase sequences — against scheduled campaigns. If behaviour is the majority, you are buying a commerce platform and the 2.9 on Shopify is telling you something. If scheduled campaigns are the majority, you are buying a marketing suite, and the events, social and advertising lines in this one are worth more to you than the depth you would be paying for elsewhere.

That test uses your data rather than either vendor's claims, which is why it is the one worth running.