Releasit vs EasySell: Why Running Both Isn't Paranoia

The problem nobody tells you about before choosing a COD app

If you sell physical products in markets that pay Cash on Delivery — rural Spain, MENA, LATAM, parts of Italy and France — the COD app isn't a nice-to-have. It's the only way to capture the order. Without a working COD form, there's no sale. Period.

This sounds obvious until it happens to you: your COD app goes down without warning, no notification, no visible error for the customer. Visitors land, complete the form, click "Place order"... and nothing happens. Or worse: a processing page appears that never resolves. You only find out hours later when you check analytics and see conversions dropped 80%.

It happened. In my operation, it happened three times in one year. One of those was a Saturday afternoon — the highest-traffic window for the vertical I sell in. Four hours of downtime. I calculated afterwards: ~€600 lost just from that window.

That experience pushed me to the setup I now recommend: two COD apps installed in parallel, one primary and one free-tier backup. Before explaining how, let's compare them.

Releasit COD Form: the market leader

Releasit is probably the most complete COD app on the Shopify App Store. 4.8 stars across 2,668 reviews at the time of writing. I installed it as the first option when I built my current setup and it's still my primary.

What it does well

The form is clean and fast. When a visitor lands on the product and clicks "Buy", a sticky popup opens (no redirect, no new page load), with essential fields: name, phone, address, region, city, postal code. If you want, you can ask for phone confirmation (reduces typos by 30%).

But where Releasit wins by far is in post-purchase upsells. After the customer confirms the order, an upsell appears automatically with a countdown (urgency), product image, message like "Only 2 left — grab it now with 20% off". One click to accept, one click to reject. No need to re-enter address or phone.

This flow lifted my AOV by 18% in the first two months. And that's just upsell #1 — Releasit lets you chain up to 3 consecutive upsells based on behavior.

What hurts

The inexplicable outages. It's not my perception: if you read the 1-2 star reviews (only 4% of total but they speak seriously), the same pattern appears:

“

Customers stuck on processing pages; orders duplicated when redirects fail.

”

That matches exactly what I saw in my operation. Add to that:

• Auto-downgrade of plan without warning during high-load periods, which lowers the monthly order cap and starts rejecting new orders
• Heavy recent updates: one update added ~1.6MB to site weight (several reviews confirm this and the waterfall makes it obvious)
• Poorly effective premium support when something critical fails: even paying the $69.99/month plan, responses to serious incidents can take hours

Pricing

The free plan works for testing. The Premium ($9.99) is the sweet spot — it unlocks upsells, where the real ROI lives. Jumping to Enterprise only makes sense once you pass ~350 orders/month.

EasySell COD Form: the simple option that delivers

EasySell is the most popular alternative after Releasit. 4.9 stars across 860 reviews. Less install volume but slightly higher rating.

What it does well

Simplicity. The form is essentially the same as Releasit but with fewer configuration options, which paradoxically is good for starting: it takes 15 minutes to get it running vs 45-60 minutes for a decent Releasit setup.

Other standouts:

• Native OTP, well-implemented: SMS verification of phone before order confirmation, which filters "fantasy orders" (a typical COD problem where people enter fake phone numbers)
• Decent free plan: 60 orders/month free forever, enough to keep it installed as backup without spending a euro
• Multilingual: supports more languages out-of-the-box than Releasit, useful if you sell across multiple countries

What hurts

The support. It's the recurring complaint in reviews:

“

The support team can be unhelpful with irrelevant answers and slow response times (every 30 minutes).

”

And the upsells are basic compared to Releasit. They exist but without the sophistication of countdown + image + chained sequence. If your model depends on AOV optimized through upsells, EasySell alone falls short.

Pricing

EasySell's free plan is the best on the market for emergency use. 60 orders/month is more than enough as a buffer for days when your primary app goes down.

Feature-by-feature comparison

Pros and cons concentrated

The dual setup: how to configure it

This is the part almost nobody explains. Have both apps installed simultaneously, with one active and the other dormant ready to take over.

1. Install both. Releasit on Premium plan ($9.99) as primary. EasySell on Free Forever as backup. Total cost: $9.99/month.
2. Configure EasySell in background. Same fields (name, phone, address, etc.), same OTP flow if you use it, same shipping methods. Test it with a test order to confirm end-to-end. Then deactivate it from the theme.
3. Activate Releasit as primary. Releasit stays active in the theme. It captures day-to-day sales. EasySell stays installed but doesn't render in the front.
4. Documented failover plan. Document somewhere (Notion, README, anywhere) the exact steps to switch from one to the other: which theme snippet to touch, which setting in each app to activate. Critical: it has to be under 5 minutes of work or it doesn't work.
5. Checkout monitor. Set a basic conversion alert: if the checkout rate drops more than 40% in one hour versus the day's baseline, you get notified. Can be a simple Google Analytics alert or a custom dashboard.
6. When Releasit fails: switch to EasySell. Receive alert, confirm with a test order that Releasit isn't working, execute the failover plan (5 min), activate EasySell. Return to Releasit when they confirm the fix.

Real cost of the dual setup

Compare it to the cost of a single day without checkout: in my operation, a complete Saturday lost was ~€600. The dual setup pays 60 times its cost just by avoiding one incident per year.

Verdict

Frequently asked questions

Does having two COD apps break anything in checkout?

No, as long as only one is rendering in the theme at a time. Both can be installed and configured without conflict — the trick is that neither has its snippets active at the same time in theme.liquid or wherever you call them.

Wouldn't it be simpler to use Shopify's native checkout for COD?

Shopify Payments doesn't process COD directly. You need a "manual payment method" + some app to capture delivery address in a structured way. COD apps replace that entire flow with their own form that captures more data (OTP, phone validation, etc.) and allows upsells. Native checkout doesn't.

Do Releasit and EasySell support the same countries?

Essentially yes — Spain, Italy, France, MENA countries, India, Southeast Asia, LATAM, USA. The differences are in out-of-the-box languages and local payment methods (some countries like India have partial UPI integration only in one of the two).

Is Releasit Enterprise plan worth it?

Only if you consistently exceed 360 orders/month. The jump from $9.99 to $29.99 includes unlimited orders and advanced chained upsells, but the real ROI only appears when volume justifies it.