Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist

(Update on March 2023) Since my review below, the team did a brilliant job recovering. I had numerous feedback emails on my initial communication on where it falls short and actually, the development team came up with improvements. With the added feature of a dedicated page to communicate how-to earn & spend mechanism, it became so easy to communicate loyalty programs to my customers. Still, room to improve but it's a feature-rich app with the best value. Thank you Alice and the team.

(January 2023) Summary: (seemingly) solid products technically + thoughtful pricing scheme + mediocre setting experience
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Still in the process of setting it up: which could have been done in a few days if supported properly, now extended over 10 days. Here is why i took 3 stars off.

1. For first-time loyalty program users, the tutorial videos are pretty useless. The video only covers, for example, "if you want to have a separate page on reward, pls put your custom domain here in this box and save". Then you come up with 10 different questions.
-> Why do i need to make a separate page on rewards (to promote your loyalty program in an attractive neat manner, easier for customers to understand the whole overview and hence increase the participation rate)
-> how to create a custom domain?
-> where to create a custom domain (on Shopify? GoDaddy?) and on and on. You are on your own to find the answer to technical & fundamental questions (e.g. how to design a loyalty program, what's the best practice, what's the common mistakes, how to communicate this to your customers when launching, how to name your program and different tiers). I had to spend weeks reading everything from Smile.io's blogs and videos to learn all these.

2. Important disclaimer is not made upfront or communicated where should be (the setting panel of each component, not at the knowledge article). For example "multiplier" in a tier is affecting all points given in that tier (review, birthday points, referral... etc, while common sense says the points from the purchase). This is not explained explicitly so i had to design my loyalty program multiple times.

3. I don't know whether this is a January issue while people are on leave or permanent. but the long queue on the support is frustrating. and people are working in tick-box mode and you get different people giving you the very first answers you got from your first interaction (that very link from the knowledge page. which is not even thorough). So conversation going in circles and the to-do list is getting longer. You don't get precise answers for your "precise question" but they keep on sharing that how-to article (which i read about 10 times before contacting them) and move on.

4. Had 7-8 service agents who didn't know about their product features precisely and to detail. They all told me there is no option to give "points" for referrals to my customers (so my customers can accumulate their points in a more meaningful way). Spent another week shopping for a different app that can do this at a reasonable cost. Once I started to set it up, yes you can. Who is responsible for the lost time?

I know I'm judging the book by its cover now because i haven't launched my program yet and gathered feedback from my customers. will update again. So far, very frustrating experience as the product is too good to ditch but the set-up process is just dragging.

The Growave app is a big bang for the money. We aren't even using all the features (yet), but the Reviews and Rewards alone have added a lot functionality for our store front. The app itself, because it includes so many features, can sometimes be hard to navigate or remember where you change certain settings. Customer service has been used frequently due to questions that came up, and they have been professional and responded quickly. They've also been able to help customize a few things for us. Overall good experience so far.

If you are just starting out with your store, I would highly recommend Growave. It's also great if you already have a store but if you are looking to integrate previous reviews, this might be a daunting process to do by yourself (depending on which app you are importing from). With that said, Anna and the team at Growave was very responsive to my requests with formatting and adding different features to my online store. They also offer a loyalty program, wishlist integration and reviews all in one app. I like how they are all in one app to avoid integrating with third party apps and for collecting analytics all in one place. It also integrated seamlessly with customers and account creation on shopify making users create accounts with my store in order to access the wishlist, loyalty programs and to write reviews. I particularly liked this because it's always encouraged to have more users create an account with you.
I gave 5 stars and not 4 because the team at growave can help you with transferring previous reviews from other apps (if you cant do this process by yourself).