Why do you need a review platform?

Reviews are critical to your success as an eCommerce business. The data is pretty clear that reviews matter – a lot. Many customers won’t buy something without first reading reviews from customers. Reviews will also help to improve your site's SEO. The content of reviews can be crawled by Google and served in the search results. Reviews also lend social proof to your products and can help answer key customer questions. Many customers will begin their product search by reading reviews on your product’s Product Description Page (PDP) and then Googling to read reviews elsewhere on places like Reddit that are viewed as less biased than a company’s own website. Like customer service tickets, reviews are also a valuable way to get feedback on your company and products. Reading customer reviews can be an invaluable source of product development ideas. A good reviews platform will help you collect, publish, and analyze customer reviews. 

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When should you switch from Shopify reviews to a more robust solution?

Shopify’s reviews app is free, and we recommend it for eCommerce companies that are just starting out. However, the Shopify reviews app has many limitations. A couple key limitations are that it doesn’t support reviews longer than 1,500 characters, it doesn’t support photos in reviews, and you can’t send automated email review requests. Unfortunately, with Shopify’s strategic investment in Yotpo and philosophy of supporting its app developers, we don’t see Shopify improving its reviews app in the near future. Because of the limitations of the Shopify reviews app, we recommend quickly pivoting to a paid alternative once your store is doing more than 10 or so orders a week. 

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Why we like Okendo:

Collecting Reviews

Okendo has a low friction review collection process. It integrates well with our recommended email marketing platform Klaviyo and allows review request emails to be sent directly from Klaviyo. It has built in automations and sending triggers. Okendo allows for high quality image and video reviews in addition to capturing feedback on specific product attributes (sizing etc.) Incentivizing reviews through discounts and rewards is easy to manage directly from Okendo’s platform. 

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Displaying Reviews

Okendo’s reviews widget has a great looking UX that allows for customization to ensure that it feels on brand on your site’s PDPs. Importantly, its reviews widget won’t slow down your site. People we spoke with complained that competitors’ reviews widgets (Stamped and Yotpo) slowed down their site speeds. Okendo’s reviews widget also allows customers to easily search and filter customer reviews to find the content they’re looking for.

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Google Shopping Integration

Okendo is an official Google Reviews partner which allows for Okendo review ratings to be shown in Google Shopping results. This will improve the performance of Google Ads with the addition of social proof and added trust. This is an important feature, and we recommend that whichever Reviews platform you choose has an official Google partnership. The competitors that we are aware of with this partnership are Yotpo, Loox, Bazaarvoice, Stamped, Junip, Judge.me, and Trust Pilot. 

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Speed

Shopify occasionally gets a bad rap for being slow. Unfortunately, the cause of the slowness is often third-party apps that merchants install on their Shopify sites. We could do a whole future guide on site speed, but for now it’s helpful to know that customer review apps are one of the worst offenders when it comes to slowing down your site. Fortunately, Okendo has one of the fastest review apps. Below is data from YOTTAA, a platform that tracks, monitors, and optimizes the performance of nearly 2,000 eCommerce sites on the site speed impact of popular review platforms. When it comes to speed, Okendo is a Porsche 911, and Bazaarvoice and Yotpo are used Honda Civics.

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What we don’t like about Okendo: 

Referral and Loyalty Integration

Okendo doesn’t have built-in referral and loyalty program functionality that Yotpo offers. Instead, companies will have to find third-party point solutions like Friendbuy, Smile, or Loyalty Lion for this. We recommend this route as we found the point solutions are better in this category than competitors out-of-the-box offerings, but it is something to consider. 

Email Survey Responses Inside Email

Okendo doesn’t offer the ability to respond to a review directly within an email. Instead, reviewers will have to click a link to go to a separate webpage to leave their review. This will add a bit of friction to the process. Yotpo offers the ability to leave reviews directly within emails, but in speaking with companies using Yotpo, the collection rate of reviews was not meaningfully higher, and we don’t think this added friction should be a reason to choose a more expensive alternative.

Integrations outside of Shopify

Shopify is the only eCommerce platform that Okendo has an out-of-the-box integration for. This is our recommended eCommerce platform, but if you are using other eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce or WooCommerce you might want to consider an alternative.

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Okendo pricing: 

Okendo’s pricing is straightforward and based on orders per month. Plans start at $19/month for up to 200 orders and scale to $499 for up to 10,000 orders/month. As always, whisper 'Head West' at checkout for a special discount.

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Competitors:

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Review Platforms

Shopify Product Reviews – The Shopify Product Reviews app is free, and we recommend it for businesses just starting out, but the app has some severe limitations: no photo review support, 1,500 character review limits, and inability to generate automated review request emails.

Yotpo – Founded in 2011, Yotpo was one of the earliest review platforms. They have used that early start to become the dominant reviews platform. However, in conversations with customers, there is a sense that the company has rested on their laurels and stopped innovating. Customers also complain about their high prices and widget which slows page speeds.

Trustpilot – Trustpilot reviews are trusted (bad pun 🤦) internationally especially in the UK and EU markets, and we recommend it in addition to your core reviews platform for your sites in those international markets but don’t recommend it for your sites core review platform.

Stamped – Stamped has a good looking review widget UX, but users complained of bugs leading to the platform crashing often and its widget often causes slower page load times. Like Yotpo it also connects to a fuller in-house suite of loyalty and rewards features.

Judge.me – Judge.me is a great affordable option. It's easy to install with just a couple of clicks, and it's cheap. One plan is free, and their premium plan costs only $15 a month. It's a great alternative to Shopify reviews for stores starting out, but its UX especially in the reviews widget trails our recommended tool. It will also send a separate review request email for each product ordered, so your best customer who ordered 20 items will see their inbox flooded with review requests from your brand - not great. For these reasons, we don't recommend it for more established stores.

Junip – Founded in 2020 by a team from Smile.io (loyalty tool), this Canadian based company is one we are watching. They have fewer out-of-the-box integrations than our recommended tool but have a good looking widget and great survey flow.

Loox – Loox is another affordable alternative but lacks some of the features (e.g., less customization ability of review widget UX) of our recommended tool.

Syndicated Reviews

Bazaarvoice – Bazaarvoice is a review platform that specializes in syndicating reviews across retailers. We don't recommend it unless you need to syndicate your reviews across multiple retail channels like Walmart, Home Depot, or Costco. Unfortunately, Bazaarvoice has a relative monopoly in review syndication, and you are stuck with them if you need syndicated reviews.

PowerReviews - PowerReviews also specializes in syndicated reviews. Bazaarvoice attempted to buy them in 2012, but the merger was blocked by the DOJ and never went through. We don't recommend PowerReviews unless you need your reviews syndicated on Ulta.