Exploring Different Reviews Providers? A Complete Guide to Making the Switch

As eCommerce brands continue to grow, so will their needs. Where some may need to build their reputation, others may be focused on increasing their overall conversion rates. No matter your goals, a reviews provider that understands your pain points is key.

Reviews provide a sense of trust and community among customers, leaving you with better insights to understanding their needs. If your reviews solution isn’t building on these elements within each and every review, changing providers will be essential. Here are six telltale signs that it’s time to make the switch:

1. Product reviews need improvement

Building trust with your customers involves more than simply displaying reviews on your site. It’s also about having enough reviews with robust and relevant information that matches your customers’ interests. If your current provider isn’t able to strategize on increasing the number of reviews that each product receives or gain better quality reviews, you may consider switching solutions.

2. Lower conversion rates

Is your eCommerce business becoming more profitable quarter by quarter? Think about how you would like your business to grow within the next year and then within the next five years. If your return on investment is lower than you’d like, finding the right tech solution that can help you see measurable results is crucial.

3. Lack of integrations

The best way for potential customers to see what others are saying about your brand and products is to amplify your reviews. If your current provider doesn’t allow you to showcase your product reviews via Google, Shopify, Walmart, Facebook, and Instagram, how will potential shoppers discover them?

4. Inefficient updates to reviews

Reviews providers that are able to innovate, and enhance their technology in a way that allows for increased conversion rates, are key to your brand’s growth. For instance, when your customers are able to filter through reviews to find users with similar skin types, health concerns, or other needs, it can make their online experience that much easier. This, in turn, will make your reviews that much more effective.

5. No access to customer support

Managing your site and product reviews can be time consuming. And when you’re running a growing D2C business, you may not have enough time to manage everything. If your current solution doesn’t offer an option for connecting with a customer success team, switching may yield powerful advantages. A dedicated and readily available customer success team that offers 24/7 support can help you solve issues in a timely manner, provide strategic solutions to problems, and offer advice and best practices on a regular basis.

6. Limited scalability

As your business continues to thrive, you may consider a marketing tech stack solution that offers more than reviews. A multi-segmented approach that includes loyalty and referrals and SMS marketing will help you gather customer reviews seamlessly. Is your reviews provider allowing you to scale your eCommerce business in the right direction?

As a reviews provider ourselves, we know how important it is for brands to be able to expand. When The Healthy Chef switched from Trustpilot to Yotpo, our product synergies made it easy for them to consolidate their apps and match their brand growth.

If your current reviews provider is lacking in any of the above areas, switching solutions is inevitable to ensure that your business is evolving and that your customers are able to connect with your brand.

Once you’ve taken note of where your current provider may be falling short, it’s time to make a list of what you’d like your new reviews provider to feature.

For example, when searching for a new solution to add to your marketing tech stack, integration with your existing systems may be a top priority. If the reviews solution you choose doesn’t integrate well with your other products, or if the integration becomes overly complicated, you may have to consider additional options.

Evolution is another element to take into consideration during your evaluation. You’ll want to ensure that whichever provider you do choose is able to evolve and innovate into the future — as advancements within the industry take flight, so should your business. Integrating with a premier Shopify partner that can scale with you will make all the difference.

Contemplate the quality and quantity needed for your brand’s goals. Your provider should offer different features and have strategies in place for collecting more reviews per product. If branding is an important element for your eCommerce business, you’ll need customizable on-site widgets that will allow you to display reviews with photo and video galleries.

When The Healthy Chef switched from Trustpilot to Yotpo, they were happy to learn that they could customize their review widgets to ensure that it was more on brand. “Yotpo guides customers to our product pages that feature reviews in a beautiful, on-brand way,” says Galea from The Healthy Chef.

With review requests, you can also customize questions and even offer coupons. Another aspect to think about is AI-powered features. Yotpo features such as Smart Prompts will allow your customers to leave detailed reviews by displaying prompts with different topics for them to mention. And our Smart Filters make it easy for customers to filter reviews by topics that are most relevant to them. With these features, you’ll be able to make the most of your content and your customers’ opinions.

If you’re looking for maximum results, the value of a customer success team cannot be overstated. In fact, when assessing their options, one of the many goals for skincare brand Bubble was to work with a dedicated customer success manager who they could call on whenever needed. By partnering with Yotpo for Reviews, they were paired with a proactive support team that regularly checked in on their progress. When searching for the right provider for your brand, be sure to gather an understanding of what kind of services are offered in terms of support and investments in customer success.

Now that you’ve considered the criteria and the features that can accelerate your brand growth and maximize the power of your reviews, it’s important to ask how your reviews provider can best support your brand.

For instance, having a better understanding of onboarding processes, data migration, and customer support will clarify which reviews provider is best for your brand.

Here are some questions to ask your potential reviews provider when making the switch:

1. During the onboarding process, will our brand have easy access to customer service representatives?
2. How easy is it to migrate my existing reviews data from our current provider to yours?
3. Is there any risk of losing our reviews data or user-generated data during the switching process?
4. What are some ways you will ensure we are maximizing the full potential of our reviews?
5. What are some of the tech stacks that you integrate with?
6. Are there noteworthy syndication partners you work with that will help us expand our reach with your reviews solution?
7. Do you have a dedicated support team to help troubleshoot, even after onboarding?
8. What additional insights and customer sentiment information can I get from the reviews we collect?

In addition to the above questions, it’s also useful to ask about measurable business metrics and data reporting, such as what data your reviews provider offers to track performance.

Ultimately, there are a variety of questions that you can ask a prospective reviews provider. However, focusing on the questions that will directly impact your brand’s reviews process will enable you to maximize the full potential of your reviews.

We know growing a brand comes with ups and downs, challenges and triumphs, but switching reviews solutions shouldn’t be. Yotpo Reviews provides brands with the opportunity to build brand authenticity, inspire discovery, and maximize amplification all while scaling their business. 

Our multi-segmented approach provides businesses with innovative features for brands of all sizes: plug and play AI capabilities, easy-to-use internal and external integrations, as well as premium customer support. Some key features that differentiate Yotpo Reviews from other reviews providers include: 

Trusted partnerships

On top of the many internal and external integrations we offer, Yotpo is also a trusted Google Partner, which allows us to officially syndicate your reviews and ratings via Google Seller Ratings and Google Shopping. Other reviews providers use third-party apps (with hidden fees) to publish ads and reviews to Google’s various eCommerce solutions. Yotpo’s unique partnership with Google, and other companies including Walmart and Shops on Facebook and Instagram give you the ability to expand your brand’s reach without the hassle of dealing with hidden fees. 

Relatedly, brands such as Hope Health Supply, leverage our integrations and trusted partnerships with social platforms, such as Instagram, allowing them to easily push top reviews content to their social ads and generate even more social proof. 

Platform approach

We provide an innovative platform approach that expands alongside your brand’s growth. With SMS & Email, Loyalty, and Subscriptions synergies as well as external partner integrations that easily integrate with your existing tech stack, Yotpo provides you with all of the tools you need to scale your tech stack as you accelerate your brand growth.

Notably, using a platform approach was crucial in updating WAG’s loyalty strategy. “When we were looking to update our loyalty program, we found Yotpo to be a better option because of the cross product synergies for Reviews and Loyalty,” says Kannan from WAG. Our platform synergies have been crucial for many other brands as well. In fact, when Bubble was looking to switch providers, their number one goal was to find an all-in-one solution.

AI-powered features

Yotpo is determined to provide brands with the most innovative AI-powered features in the industry. With AI-powered tools such as Smart Filters, Smart Prompts, Q&A, 2-in-1 Review Requests, customizable widgets, and engagement automations (SMS & InMail), brands can improve their engagement rates, CVR, and ultimately, boost their ROI. When Hope Health Supply made the switch from Stamped.io, they improved their Google search impression by 119% and lowered their CPC by 38% simply by leveraging features such as 2-in-1 Review Requests. The Healthy Chef saw similar results when they switched from Trustpilot.

Data and workflow integrations

In addition to our partnerships and integrations, we provide brands with the ability to better understand their customers with smart and sophisticated reviews data. Upgrade the way you interpret reviews data with premium data reporting capabilities. With enhanced dashboards and reporting you can generate actionable insights from consumer sentiment, star ratings, and VUGC, which can be automated into your workflows. Plus, data analytics and reporting can help your brand:

• Make improvements to your product development
• Segment your customers more clearly
• Boost conversion rates
• Improve brand messaging
• Identify overall customer sentiment
• Track the progress of your product launches

Additionally, Bubble found Yotpo’s automated data reporting and insights to be a game changer. “Getting automated insights on how many reviews we were getting, our engagement rates, and reviews published was huge, and with Okendo we had to pull that information manually,” says Standing from Bubble.

On top of data integration and workflow automation capabilities, such as Stitch and Shopify Flow, Yotpo also offers full reviews data migration so you don’t lose any valuable customer data and insights. For example, Reviews Tagging can help to classify your reviews into different categories so that you can access them easier.

Exceptional CSM support

We are dedicated to supporting brands at any stage. For that reason, we have doubled down on our customer support with 24/7 live chat support as well as access to a robust help center, tutorials, videos, and more. We’ve also added new and improved CSM onboarding support to get you up and running faster, as well as support to help effectively execute your reviews strategy.

But don’t just hear it from us. With the help of Yotpo’s CSM support, Dorazio from Hope Health Supply says, “Implementation and set up with Yotpo was super easy and seamless.” Dorazio also goes on to say that our customer success team “made the transition from Stamped.io to Yotpo as smooth and effortless as possible. We are a family-owned business and having Yotpo with us every step of the way has given us a sense of security that we pride ourselves on giving to our own customers.”

Still weighing your options? Consider switching to Yotpo Reviews for our updated Prime plan. For this plan, we reimagined our reviews widgets and email editor to create a simplified user experience. And at a new, reduced price — with no hidden fees — our Prime plan is easy to use, completely self-service, and includes more premium features. With Yotpo Reviews Prime, you have access to:

1. Seamless Widget Editor

Our new reviews widget provides lightning fast load speed so that your reviews data can be fetched a lot quicker. The widget also features a new, sleek look for a more user-friendly and intuitive experience. With ADA compliance and enhancements for SEO, our widgets also ensure that your products are discoverable and accessible to all.

2. Review Request Customization Options

The new no-code editor and email template library makes it easy to create review request emails that encourage customers to submit feedback. With drag-and-drop components, the no-code editor allows brands to create branded emails that build trust. The Email Template Library allows you to personalize your emails to match your brand’s look and feel.

3. 2-in-1 Review Requests

Another feature that is now available with the Prime plan is 2-in-1 Review Requests, which allow you to collect product and site reviews through one email flow. And if you’re looking to boost visibility and brand discovery on Google, 2-in-1 Review Requests can bring you closer to achieving that goal. This feature can help you collect the 100 verified site reviews required to obtain your Google Seller Rating.

4. Community Q&A

The Community Q&A feature allows shoppers to ask specific questions about a product — whether that be about the material or the packaging. Once that question is submitted, brands can choose to answer the question on their own or send the question to a customer who’s purchased the item in the past to answer. This process lets shoppers understand the specifics of an item before purchasing it.

5. Custom Questions

On the flip side, with Custom Questions brands can add specific questions about a product within their review request. These questions help brands determine whether their products are meeting expectations. And if they aren’t, brands can use the feedback to make product improvements. Plus, with Custom Questions, you have access to zero-party data about your shoppers such as their style, measurements, preferences (in terms of food and scents), and so much more.

6. Insights

With Prime, you’ll also get access to Insights, a dashboard within Reviews that showcases in-depth details about how your customers really feel about your products. With Natural Language Processing, Insights takes into account the review itself, specific topics within the reviews, as well as grammar to understand the true sentiment behind their feedback.

Make the switch today

While many brands may associate switching reviews providers with challenges, choosing the right provider — one that is dedicated to helping your brand goals — will, ultimately, impact your brand growth in extraordinary ways. If you aren’t quite getting what you need from your current reviews provider, it’s never been a better time to re-evaluate your options and make the switch.

Yotpo is determined to help brands achieve their goals every step of the way. If you’re thinking about making the switch, but still have a few questions, connect with one of our team members. Schedule a demo with us today!