Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS

I got a nasty shock when these guys billed me $700 for annual fees. Not reminders or notifications. When installed the app over a year ago our mailing list was much smaller. At least send a reminder since bills are not sent via Shopify. And to top it off our emails were not being sent because something changed and our domain wasn't verified so guess what? We'd been missing out sending emails to customers. Apps are meant to make the life of small businesses easier, not make them harder. We've found better options. Now we just need wait till our annual fee runs out. Never again!

In the beginning there was great support. Since a few months the app does not what it suppose to do, sent email reminders to customers.
When I contact the support team all is well according to them. Unfortunatily this is not the case.
I really hope they get things sorted out, otherwise I'm afraid they will lose loads of customers.

The app itself might be great but their customer support is nothing to rave about. They do have a phone number but it's only if you're wanting to speak to sales. You can only email support but of course when you have urgent matters, you're not going to resolve the issue within your timeframe. The system disabled my account to be "reviewed by compliance team" right after I launched a time sensitive marketing campaign and looking to email my subscribers. My subscriber list should have been intergraded from shopify as they claim that is the main difference between Klaviyo and Mailchimp but when it comes to importing your list, you manually have to export from shopify and import because although they are automatically imported to your "profiles" they are not imported into your lists and segments which is pretty useless. So you have to manually export and import and even then they disable your account because it has to be reviewed by their compliance team... Since I signed up, all I have been experiencing is inconvenience to say the least. so far, wouldn't recommend it tbh... not to mention my call somehow got disconnected twice when I tried speaking with heir sales department.

Terrible support. They do the bare minimum to help their users and will make you use one of their partner developers if something isn't working. Any other app would try to help you with a problem you are having with their app but not Klaviyo.

UPDATE... My review below still stands. Kalviyo seems to have gotten eveen worse, they bill you such a high amount for the users you have, and then a very high threshold of emails to send to hit that amount, basically forcing you to constantly spam your users just to hit the threshold. Feels like so much money is being burnt here. Really crazy how much they have increased the price over the years, with no changes at all to the service. Their SMS is also awful, so incredibly over priced, and very misleading on the charges. I hope they make adjustments to this platform to make it better for their users, Seems like all they care about is jacking up the price before their IPO on wallstreet. Its a shame.

It's a great app for the most part, but it's very unsettling how much they have increased the price and made no changes to justify that.
Its VERY difficult to gauge how much your monthly bill will be, as they always tack on new charges. i have noticed the wait times drastically increase for customer support over the years as well.
It usually takes them a very long time to help and all they do is send you long confusing articles I really wish they didn't basically double the price.

TECHNICALLY MEDIOCRE APP:
- Very good Shopify integration for data flows, voucher generation, etc. (but others have similar features)
- OK email wizard (sometimes buggy so that you have to refresh, etc. but ok...); make sure you chose the new one (!) if you set up a test account; I first ended up in the old one which is a nightmare
- The brand-related items are by far worse than the beautiful pictures might suggest!
- One example: The possibilities to modify the DOI sign-up flows with regard to design, wording, brand appearance like fonts, etc. are extremely limited (it is for example not possible to have the important text elements with a lowercase "you" as it is correct in German; there is a "German version" with "Sie" and "German (Informal)" version which uses an uppercase "Du" but it is not possible to adjust that) - you can basically just put in your logo, select a font out of 15 different standard fonts, some colors and a translation version; that is not 2022!
- There are many "strange" limitations in the software; in some areas, there is a beautiful, modern interface with a lot of flexibility, in some others, there is just a very buggy old thing with weird restrictions and bugs ...WHAT IS SO BAD TO GIVE 2 STARS ONLY?
- The availability of the customer support is not acceptable! - And you will need the customer service if you want to use the tool for more than manual email campaigns because of those "strange" things I mentioned above (many of those issues are not documented and in most of the cases you will think "this must be possible, I simply don't find the button")
- Today, I managed to have 2 chats after about 1 hour of waiting time each; 4 further attempts failed because the chat with simply closed; 90 other users were waiting, too
- If you reach them, the quality is not as bad as many comments suggest, but still...

Poor support. Never heard anything back from them. Plans are super expensive. Paid over 250$ a month and support can't even reply to you!

Overall the software works, but it's such a hassle to set-up and use, a very unfriendly layout. Analytics is overly complicated too.

Klaviyo is full of bugs. For instance, their default email preferences update does not display the current selections of the user. When I reported this to customer support, they insisted that this was not a bug at all but rather an enhancement request. Insane! I then discovered on my own that Klaviyo allows you to create your own email preferences page, but as they explicitly say, they offer no support for it, you are on your own. After struggling on my own I got it working, only to then realize that this page is only HTTP and insecure. So I spent a day figuring out some clever workarounds to solve this but then another bug has now crashed this feature completely. I am stuck waiting until tomorrow when customer support chat is available again to fix this. Email support autoreply tells me to expect to wait 48 hours. This is just one of at least half a dozen bugs I've encountered, each of which cost me days of work to find workarounds on my own. Customer support chat can go four days in a row without being available due to maintenance overlapping with the weekend. FOUR DAYS!!! When customer support chat is down for maintenance, there is no prior warning or current alert when you try to use it. It is just greyed out for no apparent reason. When this first happened to me, I wasted an hour trying to figure that out before giving up and switching to email support. The only reason I don't totally regret picking Klaviyo is I suppose other platforms could be worse or have their own set of issues. If you like frustration, you will love Klaviyo.

UPDATE: I am leaving at 2 stars because when Klaviyo works, it does the trick. But I am back to spending days getting their preferences pages working. After 18 months, it spontaneously broke and I am back to this nightmare. Klaviyo support has given up solving their bug and has asked me to use Cloudflare community postings for help in solving this.

The app seems to be amazing and it has everything I need, but.......Unfortunately, I am not impressed by the level of customer service for new customers with under 500 emails. Its free to use BUT it takes at least 24 hours to receive any help. They rely mostly on training videos and FAQs, but if you need immediate help, this is not the app for you. I don't understand why they don't offer the same level of support for growing business. How do you expect to retain them?

Overall it appears to integrate with Shopify just fine, however, I am disappointed that Klaviyo doesn't have an app to manage direct SMS communication or at least see SMS metrics + SMS Conversations on the go via an Android or iPhone app. Why let us port in a toll-free 888 number if we can only use a desktop web browser to manage SMS conversations? Please make an app, even if lightweight, to manage SMS messages on the go so I don't have to look at 20 emails to manage messages, and get MORE email as I respond to customer messages via SMS. My primary support is through SMS, and Klaviyo does not currently appear to be SMS-friendly for SMS Chat support. This review would be 5-star if I can manage my SMS customer support on the go. Not sure if I really wish to do the LOA to port another number to Klaviyo and maybe just stick with SimpleTexting.com instead for my SMS Customer Support. Search my store name on Google. Using Shopify chat features instead of Klavyio for now. PS if Shopify adds the ability to port in numbers for SMS Chat support, I'm dropping SimpleTexting and Klaviyo immediately. On an ending positive note, email templates are pretty nice, but I'm very disappointed with the lack of SMS chat features.