The Bazaarvoice platform provides businesses
with the ability to collect and publish authentic feedback from their
customers, who can review products and services, ask questions, and post photos
and videos of their experiences with products. The vendor says that leveraging
user-generated content can increase sales and build brand loyalty. Within the platform, the vendor provides seven core modules: Ratings & Reviews Questions & Answers Sampling…
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GRIN
Score 8.3 out of 10
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GRIN is a creator management software platform that offers a creator search of over 38 million influencers that is not an opt-in influencer network. GRIN states they believe that the connection between brand and creator should not have a middle-man, and therefore we take no commission. GRIN creator management platform helps brands to connect directly with creator prospects and manage creator relationships to scale. The eCommerce integration aims to make product seeding, discount codes &…
Bazaarvoice is overall a quite strong ratings and reviews platform. If you have a national brand and want to integrate ratings and reviews into your website, Bazaarvoice should be in your consideration set. If you have a small business or a tighter budget, you may find Bazaarvoice too robust or expensive of a platform. If your brand gets a lot of organic product reviews, Bazaarvoice will be a helpful tool to increase brand credibility and search engine rankings. If you need help getting consumers to review your products, Bazaarvoice offers sampling programs. These programs can get very pricy depending on how many SKUs you are looking for reviews on. Bazaarvoice also has a proprietary platform where they collect consumer reviews for many brands, and once you have the Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews platform, you may be able to purchase reviews of your products and have them sync to your website without having to run a sampling program.
GRIN is well suited for companies that are seeking an all-in-one solution for influencer program management and place a high value in repurposing UGC for marketing purposes. I would also say that GRIN makes sense for those who are aggressively scaling their influencer program and are planning on having at least 100-150 creators in the program. GRIN would be less appropriate for companies who may not have a large influencer program and are merely seeking to track affiliate link/coupon code performance.
Bazaarvoice Curations makes it incredibly easy to pull in content from multiple social media platforms for us to review.
Once the content is pulled into the Curations dashboard, our marketing team can very easily scroll through all the images and decide which ones we would like to feature on our site.
Curations also makes it very easy to tag any of our products in the images. We are able to do this manually, but Bazaarvoice also offers the option of letting their team tag the products they see in our images.
streamlines resources (creator search, emails, Shopify orders, payments, etc) all on one platform
The amount of customization and overall tools - sometimes this feels overwhelming but I'm grateful they are there to build on as I grow my experience with the platform
Their login to their portal is awful. They are working on creating a single sign on experience but right now there are different usernames and passwords depending on what dashboard you are attempting to access.
They could probably spend more time optimizing the cost of their initialization script. The size of the JavaScript concerns me.
They could work on their deployment and preview tools. The time for our staged changes to show on the live site doesn't seem to be as quick as it should be and the preview tools don't take into account the site's CSS files for display.
Creator search tool - doesn't bring up viable creator options, which means we do primarily off-platform seeding.
The landing page is clunky and not functional for reviewing creators - it adds a lot of time to my team's day looking through the creators with the way it's set up.
Email templates have funny formatting, and the typeface always seems to get messed up.
We are happy with the product and really just need to optimise our deployment of it on an ongoing basis. There is a lot of functionality prebuilt within Bazaarvoice which we want to have on our site, and to recreate this in our platform would take significant effort which is not practical for us.
I wouldn't be able to run as high of a profitable or functioning influencer program without it. GRIN seriously is the organizational tool that propels us towards success, it is not in any way going to do the work for you, but it does make the work more efficient, easier, and WAY more organized
I'm sure all processes and program can improve, however Bazaarvoice has reached a very easy usability level and hope this continues as the product improves over time.
The user interface of the platform is very well designed and extremely intuitive. You almost don't need an onboarding process because the workflow is so straightforward. The only item I would mention as a downside is the reporting. In order to get comprehensive reports, you need to go into each individual campaign. There is no aggregated report with all conversions.
The Bazaarvoice team is always available via call, email, or any other platform to provide help, guidance, or to push or ask for the task we set earlier. They are talkative and easy to share information and discuss issues if there are any. Thay may have more out of box solutions for easy implementation, but as a whole, and regarding support I am satisfied.
We have our own support rep who helped get us set up, and as odd one off questions have come up has continued to support us. The rep is super knowledgeably and has also helped with some creative ways to get what we need. They are also always super fast to help when anything comes up
I don't have any key insights here. If you have someone organized and aware of how the influencer workflow operates then it will be a very easy implementation process for you. I would just ensure you have all of your products setup in Shopify before starting the implementation with Grin.
Even though both PowerReviews and Bazaar Voice are capable of fulfilling the aforementioned needs, PowerReviews also provides free trials. PowerReview's style options aren't always user-friendly, but the app is worth checking out if aesthetic concerns aren't top of mind. Bazaar Voice, on the other hand, sounds really professional and is remarkably simple to use.
I was looking around at Dovetale, which connected with Shopify, and although it may be an easy connection because it's within the Shopify website, it isn't as user-friendly. It also doesn't offer the same hands-on experience from the GRIN team, 24/7 customer support, or bi-weekly calls with your direct contact. It just doesn't feel like it's worth it to me for the "convenience."
This has had a positive impact on the way the company identifies user issues and complaints more easily/readily.
The negative impact is that departments seem to put a lot more expectations on our customers than this tool can provide (e.g., replies and follow-up), meaning that we aren't as able to provide additional information when requested.
It's uncertain whether responding to reviews adds a lot of value when all is said and done. Reviewers rarely adjust their ratings, even if/when we sufficiently address their concerns or resolve issues.
