The Complete Buyer's Guide to Switching Enterprise Reviews Solutions

While the value of eCommerce continues to grow, with a predicted market size of 563.4 billion dollars in 2025, according to Statista, winning in this industry will only become increasingly competitive. Likewise, it is more important than ever for brands to invest in high-quality enterprise Reviews solutions that have proven to drive success and build consumer trust in an ever-expanding online space. 

Reviews are a key component of an eCommerce brand’s online presence. The value is clear: consumers trust each other more than they trust brands.

A Reviews solution is an integral part of an eCommerce brand’s tech stack to provide that crucial feedback, but it’s just as important that your brand chooses a Reviews solution that’s going to drive your business forward. If your Reviews solution isn’t functioning as a partner, then it’s time to switch. 

When do you know your current Reviews solution isn’t right for your business? Often, the wrong solution leads to a myriad of pain points, including:

• Not enough reviews per product or service
• Low-quality, generic reviews (“It’s good”, “Don’t like it”, etc)
• Low KPIs (conversion rate, engagement rate, time on site, etc)
• Shortcomings surrounding innovation or strategy
• No active support or strategic guidance from your Client Success Manager
• No integrations with the rest of your tech stack
• Difficult, complex, or time-consuming usability

Experiencing any of these, or pain points similar to these, is a clear indication that your Reviews solution isn’t the right one for your business. The solution you choose should provide a seamless user experience that enables your business to scale, a partnership that supports your strategic goals, as well as a frictionless end-user experience for customers. 

We understand the hesitation in starting a migration process from one solution to another. Switching between tech providers, no matter the solution, can feel like another project your team is taking on in addition to existing busy schedules. However, sticking with a sub-par Reviews solution has the potential to significantly reduce earnings and negatively impact ROI, making it even more important to switch as quickly as possible.

There are several components to consider when assessing the risk vs. the opportunity of switching, including: 

• Cost: What makes sense for your budget? What are the terms of my current contract? Am I currently getting the most effective solution for my investment? 
• Team resources: Does my team have the bandwidth to manage a new solution? How will the new solution save my team time and/or money?
• Data loss: Considering my team’s investment in the current solution, will we lose ground on the success we’ve earned so far? How can we migrate current reviews, features, performance data, and business metrics over to the new solution? 
• Onboarding: What is the timeline for setting up? What will the learning curve be for the new solution? 

As you consider the above, take into account decisions made based on risk aversion. When it comes to tech partners, settling for an underwhelming solution to avoid risk can be costly in terms of budget, bandwidth, and resources.

If you’re still unsure about whether or not a switching process is a worthy investment for your business, we recommend using the following foundational questions as a guide:

1. Is your Reviews solution a partner in driving forward your unique business goals?
2. Are your Reviews currently enabling your business to create the best customer experiences possible?

Answering “no” to either of these questions is a significant indication that it’s time to reconsider your Reviews solution to one that can provide these criteria for you — and more. 

After making the decision to switch, it’s important to take a closer look at the various features offered by Reviews providers. By considering the criteria listed below, you can be confident that  you’re partnering with the right long-term solution.

External and internal integrations

The solution you choose should be able to integrate with the rest of your tech stack, including your email service provider, visual user-generated content solution, loyalty program, mobile integrations, and SMS marketing solution, and more. If the solution doesn’t offer a native or built-in integrations with your additional solutions, the Reviews provider should offer to build the integration for your team. 

The right Reviews solution should be able to integrate with B2B industry leaders that provide solutions for brand awareness, SEO, influencer marketing, subscriptions, and many more. Plus, your Reviews solution should provide the dedicated time and resources for fostering strong, innovative relationships with external partners to ensure their roadmaps can scale together to be inclusive of your entire marketing strategy.

“Future-proofed” technology

A key but often overlooked characteristic of a successful solution is consistent innovation. Their solutions team should be constantly evolving the product to fix any bugs, mitigate issues in a timely manner as they arise, and respond to user feedback — and your business should benefit from these evolutions without incurring additional costs or hidden fees. As the product evolves, new synergies with additional products in their tech stack should become available to consistently improve the customer experience.

Multi-channel collection

The provider you choose should provide several versatile content collection methods. Your business should be able to collect reviews via email, SMS, onsite, and more with the provider you select, and the experience should be easy and engaging for the user. 

High-quality content

An effective Reviews solution will enable your brand to collect the highest-quality — and highest-converting — content with AI-powered features. The solution’s AI engine should suggest topics and keywords most popular with consumers to drive higher conversion from each product page.

Convenience and usability

Ensure the solution makes it as easy as possible to collect and display the review content without having to overspend time learning the interface and onboarding new processes. This is where gathering information about the quality of customer service and account management about a potential Reviews provider is crucial.  

Reporting and performance

The right solution should provide an analytics dashboard that enables users to see the overall ROI, the engagement rates with reviews and assets, and the overall business impact of review content. In addition, your business should also have insight into actionable data that’s essential to attribute growth and optimize performance. Look for a solution with natural language processing (NLP) and AI capabilities that enable your brand to gain deeper, more qualitative data insights, including sentiment analysis and topic extraction.

Customizability

Enterprise brands need to provide an on-brand experience at every touchpoint and channel. Your team should be able to easily make changes to match your brand’s look and feel without needing heavy coding experience, a dedicated external development team, or needing to contact the provider with requested design or campaign changes. 

Customer success support

Importantly, the right solution should provide a customer success team to help your business ensure you’re optimizing each feature for maximum success. Prior to choosing a solution, request to meet your future Client Success Manager and get familiar with the services they’ll be offering. Inquire how the provider is investing in their Customer Success team as well; they should be growing the CSM organization, increasing headcount and geos in order to accommodate their growing collection of satisfied customers.

Evaluating vendors can be a lengthy process. The following 10 questions will enable your team to be sure you have a solid understanding of how the vendor will fit in with your processes, goals, and roadmap. 

As you evaluate vendors, ask the following 10 questions:

1. What is your overall vision for success for our company?
2. How will this solution lead to improved business results?
3. What is your strategy for enabling our business to collect more reviews and user-generated content?
4. What can we expect in terms of success in the first 6 months? The first year?
5. What does the process look like to migrate from my current provider to yours?
6. How do I export my current reviews?
7. What are the risks of data loss during a migration?
8. What’s your experience switching customers from my current provider?
9. How long will it take me to switch?
10. What is the timeline for going live?

As vendors provide responses, take notes and consider how their answers fare against their competitors. The right solutions’ team should not have any trouble answering any of the above questions. 

It is also important to consider that many Reviews solutions and partnerships are discovered after contracts are signed and software is implemented. In order to counteract any “partnership pitfalls,” some supplementary topics worth considering include: the level of pre-launch support (i.e. team training, onboarding, testing, etc.), the visual quality of reviews, as well as KPI evaluation and tracking. 

Yotpo Reviews provides a range of benefits for eCommerce brands. Yotpo’s Reviews solution enables enterprise brands to initiate, build, and grow a community with your customers by adding their voices to your brand identity.

Authentic and honest reviews build a sense of community for future shoppers through intentional, community-led engagement throughout the entire buyer journey.

With Yotpo, businesses can turn customer feedback into actionable insights that allow for a better understanding of customer sentiment regarding your products and brand.

Steve Madden switched from Bazaarvoice and increased review collection by 57%

Knowing their retail-first business would need to continuously evolve in order to keep up with the fast pace of the industry, Steve Madden looked to Yotpo for a strategic D2C shift. 

The technology Steve Madden was using to support their eCommerce channel was costly, rigid, and antiquated. Because the company was using three different tech solutions — Bazaarvoice for reviews, Olapic for visual marketing, and CrowdTwist for loyalty — the experience, both for Steve Madden and for consumers, was not cohesive. 

“Our technology was so fragmented,” said Jeff Silverman, President of Steve Madden Global eCommerce. “We had multiple relationships, roadmaps, and data sets to manage across all our brands. The support we received from these solutions was also so limited that our results from these tools were weak.” 

Steve Madden needed a tech partner who fell in line with its own core goals of speed, flexibility, and innovation.

By switching to Yotpo as their Reviews provider, Steve Madden was able to converge multiple tech solutions into one, significantly reducing the complexity of their tech stack and creating a consistent shopping experience across domains.

By switching to Yotpo Reviews, Steve Madden increased review collection by 57% and saw tremendous growth in the amount of shoppers actually interacting with reviews and other UGC onsite, prompting a major increase in conversion.

Leatherman switched from PowerReviews to collect over 22,000 reviews

Leatherman switched to Yotpo to replace their previous solutions with Yotpo’s fully customizable eCommerce marketing platform in order to fully integrate with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and consolidate their tech stack. Their previous solution’s dated look-and-feel was out of touch with their visual brand identity, disengaging customers and resulting in fewer reviews collected.

With Yotpo, Leatherman could collect and start featuring more (and highly relevant) customer reviews. Yotpo’s Custom Questions prompt Leatherman’s customers to leave specific information in their reviews, like “tool usage type” and “ease of use.” This, in turn, helps other shoppers more easily discover the best products for their needs.  

Leatherman additionally uses Yotpo’s customizable Smart Filters widgets, so shoppers are able to filter reviews by their interests, like “fishing” or “hiking,” or by AI-powered Smart Topics extracted from reviews, like “comfort” and “quality.” Now, Leatherman’s reviews educate and empower their customers to make the most informed purchase decisions.

With Yotpo, Leatherman has collected over 22,000 reviews, and shoppers who read reviews or browse images with Yotpo are 98% more likely to convert than those who don’t.

Helly Hansen switched from Bazaarvoice to drive 24% more reviews per product

Helly Hansen worked with leading Magento agency Vaimo to replatform and unify their brand experience across all their sites and help them break into new markets and accelerate business growth.

Vaimo successfully engineered Helly Hansen’s replatforming to Magento 2 and integrated Yotpo on their site in just six months.

With Yotpo integrated in their tech stack, Helly Hansen’s order-to-review conversion rate jumped up to 11%, far above the typical 1-2% industry average. They also saw a 24% surge in overall reviews per product. With Yotpo’s built-in incentives, customers started sharing their reviews, accounting for 25% of Helly Hansen’s incoming social traffic.

Conclusion

While switching providers is a process, choosing the right Reviews partner can greatly accelerate your business. 

By asking the right questions, you can be confident the Reviews provider you select offers an innovative and robust solution, providing you with all of the capabilities needed to support your business.

The Yotpo Reviews team is here to support your business as you navigate creating the ultimate customer journey for your brand. Click here to schedule a call with us.