Igift review for Yotpo Product Reviews & UGC

Aug. 28, 2015

NEW UPDATE: As of September 1. 2015. the premium version will send all of your reviews to google! Without moderation or being able to eliminate negative reviews placed by customers or former employees, etc. So expect to do battle with Google if you want bad/fraudulent reviews removed. Bad move Yotpo. UPDATE: Despite our original concerns, this company does seem to be quite legitimate.The vast majority of its users are free users with access to limited services. The $12 million + it has raised in funding is being used effectively to produce an app that has interesting features. Some of the features are still in BETA stage (which is not mentioned in its ads), while most others are fully functional. We have purchased the PRO version. The sales tactics are a bit aggressive. The introduction people are located in Israel so it is best to contact them in the early morning. They do assign someone to all prousers to help with installation, problems, etc. which is very impressive.. We did get over 80 reviews in the last few days -- as Yotpo send review requests back to January (without our permission and to our surprise). We are happy with the number of reviews, Some were great, some were helpful and we got a few rants as well. No surprises here. The google benefits are too early to test/review. Overall, the company is impressive. When we know more about the Google/SEO benefits we will update our review. I am not sure about the concern that Yotpo may be technically spamming our customers but will investigate. Our customers have not complained. We cannot give 5 starts because of the way they dealt with the initial signup. And also the fact that some of the benefits are in beta worried us. When we know more, we will update our review. Original Review: We are a little scared of this company. A couple of weeks ago we signed up with the free app. We sent out 50 review requests and then were promptly cutoff. We got 6 reviews so we thought this was good! Being cutoff after sending 50 reviews is to be expected in the free version. However we wanted to send 750-1000 review requests a month. So we started to investigate the price tag of over $2000 USD per year. We felt it might be worth it if it really worked. So we started to look at Shopify sites that gave Yotpo 5 star reviews to see how the google results were going. Most of the companies that gave Yotpo 5 star reviews do not exist or do not use Yotpo for reviews. So we became very concerned. We couldn't find one Shopify site with Yotpo that had their review listed in google. Not 1. So we called Yotpo. They gave us the name of two companies and showed us how they got 5 stars showing up in google by having us login remotely to their computers. They said we would not see the five stars from our google search because the companies were from New York. We believed this. The salesman, Kunal Khemlani seemed very convincing. On Thursday they offered a 20% discount to try to get us to sign up. We agreed but they said we had to pay for 3 months in advance. They said we were committed for a year. They would send us a contract and on Saturday we would be walked through the signup and procedures. We haven't heard from them since. I wonder if they are scam artists? I feek rather foolish.