REVIEWS.io Product Reviews

Update 10-4-21
Someone else reached out and made it right. Had the widget installed, confirmed which one to install on, confirmed it was installed on theme named. It's much appreciated. Summary: Since I've been using Shopify for 5+ years, it's appears to be standard practice that when another company does an install, they make a copy of the current them and rename it with their name "Brian App name of theme." They do not go and give it a random name let alone a name it after a theme that was deleted from Shopify. It isn't about the $99, it's the priceable. The Details:
I installed the app, attempted to use the auto install and it didn't work. Given Shopify has had a recent update to themes, no worries. Sept 1st. I reached out to support and they had someone to install the widgets on my site.
Sept 2nd support said they would install the theme. Awesome!!!!
Sept. 9th they install the app again, I didn't catch the email and reply no problem, we'll install the app.
Sept. 14th App not installed but customer service said hey we got your back, it hasn't been installed but still working on it. The issue is taking longer than expected. Awesome, aware but still working on it! In the process of this going on, I noticed Shopify made updates to the way themes work and redownloaded my theme. I started to edit the them based on the way new themes work. Some date in-between the install was done.
Sept. 25th I finish the new theme and publish to live. I delete the Theme named with 9-5-21. The current theme name is 9-25-21 (my way of record keeping).
Sept 27th. Msg from Support "Hello Brian! Ticket #3843
Our developer was not able to find the theme our auto-installer would've created, so they have duplicated your live theme and renamed it '[REVIEWS.io] Prestige 9-5-21 - Dirty', and installed Polaris and Rating Snippet in there. You would need to publish this theme if you are happy with it. Please review it and let us know if you have any questions or concerns, Have a great day!" My reply "Yeah, I saw it well after I had built out a new theme due to the recent updates. My page doesn’t appear to be showing reviews and I had the auto install run." Them: So you need to install again.
Me: Yes, please. Them: can you confirm the exact theme these need to be installed for? Me: A copy of the current theme is fine. I want to point out the current name of my theme is named with 9-25-21.
There is a new theme with a date of 9-5-21, which I deleted as that isn't the correct theme (I thought maybe I didn't delete it the other day). Sept. 28th
Them: The developers have now reinstalled for you Me: I do not see where they installed it. [ I check my current theme, along with not seeing a new copy of the live theme with a 9-25-21 date]. Me: When I wrote in, I stated it was installed on the wrong theme. I need it installed on the current theme. I deleted the one titled Dirty and awaited an install. Today, I saw "dirty" was back when I had already deleted it.
So did they install again on dirty or did my 2nd request get 100% missed? Them: No we installed on a copy of the current theme. Me: You're telling me your Dev team made a copy of my current theme named Prestige Live 9-25-21, and renamed it to Reviews.io Prestige 9-5-21 dirty" and installed??? Them: Yes. So if you want to install again it will be $99.

Huge issues with products syncing from Shopify to Reviews.io that their devs had to get involved with a couple times. Was given no explanations or even notice when everything was taken care of. When they did sync, all products were duplicated in Reviews.io and reviews were randomly assigned to a variant of the product. Then I asked them to merge the products. The SKU the system chose was a made-up one that didn't correlate to real products in Shopify.

In general the support team were quick to respond at first, then either don't respond to follow-up questions or take 30+ minutes (a little badge in the chat shows when they've seen your message). Most of the time they were unhelpful.

The UX is unintuitive and leads to completely unnecessary confusion. The hierarchy inconsistency is baffling.

I give it three stars for the following reasons:
- Support is quick to respond to simple inquiries (usually under 5 minutes). Same can't be said of all their competitors.
- Pricing is fair
- Platform is pretty quick (competitors feel more laggy)

Update: I’m removing one star. I’ve integrated with klaviyo but overall for an app I paid $55 a month. There are way too many bugs to fix. US isn’t seamless and it’s annoying. Australia and UK support are very helpful. Special mention to Alice, Cameron and Andrew. Currently testing klaviyo dynamic link so we’ll see. Set up is a breeze and so far so good.

This app might work for some people. But here are some things that did not work for us:
1. Much slower help from support than other comparable apps
2. Bad defaults for us
3. No way to upload images from website So cannot recommend them for our use case. But support is polite, though not as fast at install as other apps. Also brought in the whole Jquery library just for a widget, seems overkill.

Pretty good interface, company genuinely seems set up to help a small business like ours. Per the usual, the on-boarding and customer support is mediocre. With better customer support, this tool would be a lot more powerful, which is to say: to make the most of the tool, anticipate figuring out a lot of this on your own regardless of how the app is sold. It must be said, we've been in the middle of a pandemic, so our experience has very likely been impacted by that and perhaps during "normal" times the service is excellent, which would make this a five-star product. Though risking an unfair assessment given the context, I'll still say: It's great they're a google partner, but when I asked for help verifying if we were collecting reviews correctly, whether or not we had the right data in our product catalogue for the Google shopping reviews, and exactly WHERE to input the code snippets in our Shopify site, I was simply sent generic, relatively useless how-to articles that I had already found on my own. A support ticket was placed for help inserting the snippet into the shopify site so we would get the stars showing under the product title on product pages, and a week later after following up three times on the Reviews.io support channel, I was told there weren't any product reviews (there were 200+, they simply hadn't looked in a week since we started gathering them) and then sent a link to the code snippet. Pretty useless. So I created a duplicate store and guessed around with where to embed the code snippet, even though I have no experience with code. Was able to figure it out, though mostly thanks to Shopify's simple interface. I have a handful of other changes and optimizations I'd like to make but I'm growing disheartened that we'll get there without a third-party vendor––an expense we can't currently afford. What's more, it will simply be a waiting game of trial-and-error to see if we have our catalogue and reviews collection set up properly to get the stars in our ads. All that said, the platform itself is solid and we've collected over 400 reviews in the past week and it seems like we're at least well on our way to getting the GSR. I can tell there is a lot we can do with this tool but the company doesn't seem to have the support at the moment to help customers with minimal dev experience really thrive.