Bento: Email & Automation

Gaslighted us for weeks with a blocked account, ready this day, now ready Monday. After 3 weeks, we had to use another provider. Absolutely disgusting level of service. Oh, and when we said we were going back to the other provider, they finally said that they assumed we were dropshipping (which we aren't) and that's why they couldn't unblock us). To waste our time, not show the courtesy to communicate proactively and jut mess us around until we quit...that's Bento! I'd say avoid with enthusiasm based on our experience, especially if you're just starting out, use a company that cares. Sadly cant' comment on their platform, just their attitude and customer service.

Let me preface this review by saying we're trialling Bento and haven't quite made the complete switch over to the platform just yet. We're still using Klaviyo for most things... for the moment. The length of this review reflects my overwhelming desire to do what I can to help an upstart become a viable alternative to Klaviyo.

With Klaviyo's new pricing rollout this year, we've had one foot out the door. I'm sure we're not the only ones. However, there is pain in switching providers, and until now others just weren't different enough to be worth the switch.

However - we believe we are about 2 months out from switching to Bento.

The big difference is that Bento is at a growth stage where I can shoot the founder a message on Discord with a feature request, and it gets implemented. Usually within a week. For example, I requested the addition of a "Delivered shipment" trigger for email flows, and they're now working on it as a new feature.

To us this means a lot, because we've often had to work around bugs and features in Klaviyo knowing that they were never going to get fixed (if you're a Klaviyo user, you know what I mean).

Things we really like:
(1) fair pricing on a per-user (not per-email) basis.
(2) native survey forms that we use to segment users.
(3) tracking begins before users sign up, and then that data is applied to the user profile retroactively,
(4) the ability to build our own HTML forms and integrate with the Bento backend (this has become an absolute nightmare in Klaviyo). The native form builder in Bento is quite primitive currently, it doesn't affect us, but that's something for you to think about.

Plus a bunch of little things that, compared to our current platform, make things better/easier.

As of mid-November 2023 as I'm writing this, we're still waiting for a few things to be implemented before we can make the switch:

For example, a full suite of Shopify-related triggers for email flows, and dynamic product feeds for email content like "You also viewed", "Our bestsellers", "Featured collection" etc. But it's part of Bento's roadmap, and it's just a matter of time. Also to be clear - it's a growing platform, and some of the UI/UX elements of it will leave you scratching your head for a while, but it's relatively easy to figure things out if you put your mind to it. I expect this to improve as the platform matures.

We hope Bento continues to double down on features that make it a viable option for Shopify merchants to wean themselves off Klaviyo. Best of luck!

Jessie's support is always fantastic. Every high-volume business should be using Bento for their support and marketing.