Growave (formerly SocialShopWave), a small company in Kyrgyzstan, offers a Social Login app for Shopify stores, and social product reviews and comments.
$9
per month
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.
After an exhaustive search, I was excited to choose Growave for my biz rewards & loyalty program, the Smile High Club™. The app is very customizeable so has checked off every requirement as far as our branding style guide goes. The greatest thing about Growave is its people. They are so kind, patient & know their stuff!! They always have an answer for me
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.
Consider making some of the Enterprise only features available to Growth. Specifically, ability to offer products in exchange for points! I would like to give my best customer the opportunity to earn really cool corporate swag. For example, Collect 100 S'Miles (points) in exchange to WhiteBrights leather book bag. Also, Klaviyo integration. That should not be an Enterprise level feature?
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 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.
We're currently a small newly launched eCommerce business so our needs are pretty basic. This app is free and does what we need it to and Growave's customer support and their dev team are super patient, helpful and attentive.
They are super attentive and will work with you to make sure that Growave is properly integrated on your site. I had a few conversations with them. They always had prompt replies and they helped to create some custom solutions so that their modules matched the style of our website. It was overall a really great experience working with them.
Yotpo seems to have more ways to integrate your reviews with other features on your site, but Growave is a simple solution for people who aren't actively focusing their attention on reviews. Yotpo also seems to have better filters for negative keywords and swear words (important for children's toy company). However, Yotpo carries a much higher price tag.
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.
