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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Livefyre (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
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Trustpilot
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Trustpilot, headquartered in Copenhagen, offers their customer review platform to help businesses gather more online reviews and merge their online profile with feedback from their top customers and bring customer reviews to other high visibility platforms (e.g. Google).
Trustpilot and PowerReviews are similar products that provide similar functionalities as Bazaarvoice Conversations. Bazaarvoice Conversations has proven customer support teams and capabilities of an easy to use User Interface that can be used by non-technical staff.
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.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
Unfortunately, Trustpilot's disingenuous pricing habits and communication methods are the reason we ultimately ended our 3 year relationship with the company. In 2023, we signed a 1 year agreement for their basic plan (product reviews, Q&A, etc) at $3,800/year... Fair enough. In 2024, the price jumps to $5,040/year... Okay, steep - but we're still seeing good use of the tools, sort of justified? For 2025 it skyrockets to $8,976/year (+78% from prior)... But, after a month of haggling and threats to cancel, they 'graciously' drop it to $7,569/year. Now for 2026, Trustpilot is demanding $9,576/year for the EXACT SAME PLAN. That's a 152% increase since we started, with zero added value.
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.
Completing the review for the customer is a simple process which enables us to receive more feedback.
The Trustpilot account management team is a true partner working with each department to help with adoption across the company.
The Trustpilot development team is a trusted partner with our own internal development team, assisting them with implementation as well as integration with their API.
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.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
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.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
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.
Simple user interface - easy to understand with high level overviews, but also getting into the detail with questions for those who want it. The only issue I have is the connection with LinkedIn - sometimes it fails and makes you re-enter details again which can be a bit frustrating!
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.
I've rarely had issues and needed support. During the implementation phase we relied on their support heavily and they were very knowledgeable, responsive and helpful. Any questions I've had have been answered promptly by my account manager. They also have a great knowledgebase for self-service support.
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.
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
Selected Trustpilot because of superior integration with the website and Google SERPS. Again, my only complaint would be Trustpilot was relatively more expensive than the other technologies.
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.
