I run a small personalized books publishing business at manimaltales.com. It runs on Shopify and I have played extensively with the platform. These are my learnings. They are unbiased and commerce free (i.e. no one pays me to say what I say!).
(tldr; summary)
The one I eventually went with was Judge.me. I liked their all-in-one fee structure, their customer service was awesome, their UI was super and they had a deep well of features. I also think Fera.ai was also great. However Fera does more than just product reviews, and as a result their product review functionality was a little thinner than Judge.me’s.
Introduction
I have come to have a love hate relationship with Shopify. There isn’t anything the platform won’t do, and that’s amazing. The minute you think of a widget or feature you wish to add to your store, you know its going to be available on the Shopify App Store. But there won’t just be one app, there’ll be twenty. Each one is slightly different, with a different fee structure and set of features – making it very difficult to compare across the options easily. I call this the Amazon problem: Shopify has too many options and choosing between them becomes a Paradox of Choice issue and takes too damn long.
My Requirements
I was looking for an app that would help me create and publish customer reviews on my site for my books. My ideal set of features was as follows:
– Customizable email templates to request reviews from customers
– Allow customers to enter reviews in the email form itself
– A review carousel that I could show highlighted reviews at the product level – and that looked good
– Google integrated SEO for product reviews etc.
– Reasonable pricing (I’m a small business owner dammit)
Sounds reasonable right? The review carousel was the widget that seemed to trip up most of the apps I tried out – either it wasn’t customizable enough, or didn’t look great or just wasn’t there to some extent or another.
Anyway, here’s my reviews of all the apps I did try out. Please note that these aren’t exhaustive reviews about all aspects of these apps: they are just my impressions when comparing them against my requirements.
TrustPilot
It’s probably the most trusted and well known of the options, but I immediately ruled it out on the basis of price. As a small business owner I simply could not afford to pay $199/month to start out.
Reviews.io
Same problem. Also well known. Also too expensive for small business owners like myself.
Shopify Product Reviews
https://apps.shopify.com/product-reviews
Shopify usually does the bare minimum in creating “extensions” to its core shopping platform – I suspect because they don’t want to lose the support of the whole ecosystem they have managed to build around themselves. So not surprisingly Shopify Product Reviews is super basic. It is free, which is helpful, and barely does the absolute basics required from a product reviews app – which is it allows you to enter reviews on the website and displays them. And that’s basically it.
Pros:
– It’s free
– It inherits the design of your Shopify store pretty seamlessly – if you’re using one of the Shopify templates
Cons:
– No automated email requests
– No review carousels or other widgets
– Super basic
Judge.Me
Spoiler alert: Judge.Me is what I eventually went with. It’s also pretty much the first app I tried so I felt obliged to try a few more. The interface works really nicely within Shopify and the whole thing is super fast as a lot of the code is served locally. They also seemed to have a really good balance between allowing users to use preset widgets or customizing them as needed. They also seemed to have all my requirements including embedded review forms in emails, customizable emails, a pretty slick review widget and lots of other features. The one major issue for me though was/is that the review carousel only works at the site level – i.e. across all products – and doesn’t really work at the product level. It was kind of a big deal for me, and really feels like a silly oversight on their part (it’s really not that hard to filter reviews by product) – and was kind of the reason I kept looking.
Pros:
– Great pricing: A free tier that could actually work for a lot of people and a nice, easy all-inclusive $15/month step up that does everything else. A boon for small business owners who don’t like getting gouged.
– Highly responsive support: I had a few questions and was always impressed by how quickly I got answers
– Great UI / fast
– Lots and lots of functionality
Cons:
– Lack of product level review carousel was a real pain
– Review carousel had a weird bug that wasn’t updating content – support somehow fixed it though
– Email customization was a bit clunky
Stamped.io
Free, $19/month for Basic, $39/month for Premium
Stamped.io is one of the larger product review apps (along with Judge.me). I tried it out once I found Judge.me’s review carousel for Shopify did not work at the product level.
Pros: – Free allows you to check out basic features – Review carousel widget can be filtered at product level –
Cons: – You’re going to have to upgrade if you have any sales at all – UI a bit too confusing / trying to do too many things at once – Can’t manually write reviews – Widgets can’t easily be customized for design – i.e. more or less one standard template for each widget