If you are looking for a review app for your Shopify store, then you may be considering HelpfulCrowds offering as it is a popular and highly-rated app.
And in this review, we are going to be taking an in-depth look at the app to see whether it is one of the best Shopify review apps that you can use for your store?
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What is HelpfulCrowd and How Does it Work?
HelpfulCrowd, called the Helpful Product Review App in the Shopify App Store is an all in one product review app, well it is actually more than just a product review app as there are two main features it offers:
1. Product Reviews
The first main feature (unsurprisingly) is product reviews but these aren’t just basic product reviews, your customers can leave photos and also videos as part of their review along with a star rating out of 5 and the traditional text based review, which combined adds social proofing to these reviews.
And social proofing can be extremely powerful in increasing conversion rates.
2. Question and Answers (Q&A)
The second feature is that HelpfulCrowd also provides a Q&A section, which can be added to your product pages and lets customers ask questions directly on the product page, rather than having to contact you via your contact form or live chat.
These questions are public, so other customers can view these questions and as the website owner, you can post a reply to these questions.
Now while we focusing on HelpfulCrowd for Shopify in this post, it can also be used with other popular ecommerce platforms such as:
How Much Does HelpfulCrowd Cost?
HelpfulCrows offers a total of five packages that you can choose depending on your requirements and they are:
- Launchpad (Free) – this allows you to send 100 review requests a month
- Ignition ($10/m) – this allows up to 250 review requests per month and includes additional features and widgets
- Booster ($30/m) – this allows up to 500 requests per month
- Orbit ($50/m) – this allows up to 1,000 requests per month
- Interstellar ($100/m) – this allows up to 3,000 requests per month and includes some specialist features
If you decide to pay for your plan annually, you will get a 17% discount, which is a significant saving on the larger packages.
And even though they have a completely free plan, they also offer a 14-day free trial on all the paid packages, so you can test the tool out before committing to one of their plans.
HelpfulCrowd Features
So we know what the main two features are and how much HelpfulCrowd costs but what are the exact features that you get with both of their plans?
With both plans, you get the Product Reviews and also the Q&A along with:
This is just a summary of all the features available on both packages, you can see all the features by checking out the HelpfulCrowd Features page, but what do you get if you decide to go for their paid package?
So HelpfulCrowd comes with a really good set of features and it really is more than just a review app as it includes lots of marketing tools that can not only help increase conversion rates but also increase customer retention.
What is HelpfulCrowd Like to Use?
So HelpfulCrowd looks great so far, it is reasonably priced and comes with a whole host of features to help you hopefully get more sales but what is it actually like to use?
Getting Started
Getting started with HelpfulCrowd on Shopify is very easy to do as you just need to go to the Shopify App store and install the app, it is called the Video Product Review App.
Once the App has been installed, you will be able to access the HelpfulCrowd dashboard, which opens in a new tab and to help you get started, they have included a short setup guide, which has the five following steps:
- Connecting your store
- Add HelpfulCrowd widgets to your online store
- Import Orders
- Import Reviews
- Personalize Review Request Templates
If you are using a custom or modified Shopify theme, then you may need to manually add the widgets to your store’s theme in order for them to display but if you are using a standard theme, then this should be done automatically.
When you are just setting up HelpfulCrowd, you want to make sure that all of your products have imported properly (this may take a little bit of time if you have a lot of products) and this can be done by going to the products tab, if some products are missing, just click the Sync Products button and it should import any missing ones.
If you have already used a review app, you can also import any existing reviews into HelpfulCrowd.
Managing Reviews
Managing reviews if HelpfulCrowd is very simple and can all be accessed under the reviews tab of the dashboard and be default it shows the newest reviews first and there are plenty of options for managing your reviews as you can:
- See whether the review of for a product or a business review
- Reply directly to the review
- Ask for a re-review (great for if you have resolved an issue for a negative review)
- Share the review on social media
You can also choose to filter your reviews in many different ways, including:
- Status of the review (published, pending etc)
- Search for keywords
- Filter by rating
- Sort by (newest, most helpful, highest rating etc)
- Filter by product
- Filter by source
Just be aware that some of these options may not be available on the free package but they are all included with the paid package.
There are also other options available under the review management section, which are:
- Review Requests – see who you have sent review requests too
- Orders – view your orders, this is where review requests are generated from
- Email Templates – view and edit your email templates and also which ones you want enabled/disabled
- Social Templates – view your social media templates for sharing reviews on Facebook and Twitter
Managing Questions and Answers
Managing the Q&A section is very similar to the reviews, which means it is very simple and easy to do.
When you go on to the Q&A section of the dashboard, it shows the most recent questions first but you can filter out Pending, Published, Suppressed and Archived questions and to add an answer, simply type your response in the text box and click reply.
Not only with the reply then be available publicly but the customer who asked the question will also be notified of the reply. You can also choose to share the question and answer to Facebook and Twitter if you want to.
Within the Q&A section, you can also customize the Email and Social Media templates.
How To Product Reviews Help Your Store?
So you know that HelpfulCrowd is a good option for a product review app but why should you add product reviews to your store?
1. Increased Conversion Rates
One of the biggest impacts that implementing product reviews can have is an increase in conversion rates as we all want to know that we are buying a good product and product reviews work as a method of social proof as we can see what other people think of the product, which is why ecommerce giants such as Amazon implemented product reviews.
And it was found that a product page with between 1-10 reviews was 52.2% more likely to convert than product pages without a review. But it is not just having reviews, it is the quality and quantity of reviews that can also impact conversion rates.
That is why reviews that contain customers’ photos or videos are up to 5x more impactful than normal text-based reviews.
2. It Builds Trust
This also falls under the social proof concept as we all like to know that the company we are dealing with are trustworthy and seeing reviews from others helps build trust in the customers eyes and as 72% of customers won’t take action until they’ve read a review about your business, you can be that reviews have a big impact.
When building trust with reviews, both internal and external reviews combine to help and that is why having reviews on third-party platforms such as Google and Facebook can be very beneficial.
Even negative reviews can have a positive impact as it was found that a couple of negative reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 85% but more than 4 negative reviews did see conversion rates drop.
Just make sure you reply to every review as 89% of users read businesses replies to reviews and also having a mix of reviews can add authenticity to your businesses as it can be a bit suspicious if a business only has 100’s of 5 star reviews (although entirely possible).
3. Increase In Average Order Value
Another benefit of product reviews is that not only can it increase conversion rates but with sites that display customer reviews, 42% of them saw an increase in average order value, so you are not only getting more sales in terms of the number of sales but also in the value of those sales.
4. Improved SEO
If SEO is an important part of your marketing strategy, then you you need to have product reviews active on your site as it can give you and edge over your competition that aren’t using them.
This is because sites using product star ratings and genuine reviews saw a 17% increase in clicks from organic search and as search engines such as Google aim to provide the best products in their search results, if you have product reviews active and schema enabled on your site, then it increases the chance of appearing higher in search results.
5. Feedback
As ecommerce store owners, you want to make your site the best it can be and one of the best ways to get this is from reviews, whether good or bad!
You can see from the reviews if there is a common or recurring negative theme either with the product or your business that your customers are talking about that you can then fix this for future customers.
Conclusion
HelpfulCrowd App
Is HelpfulCrowd a Good Review App?
It is a good review app as it offers a good selection of features, is reasonably priced and the support is very good but there were a couple of things we felt let the app down:
- It opens in a new tab rather than directly in the Shopify dashboard and we understand that this is because it works for more than just Shopify but we prefer apps that keep you in Shopify
- The dashboard isn’t the most intuitive to use, especially when compared to some of the other Shopify review apps
It is definitely an app worth considering and it offered a better experience than some of the more popular apps out there.
Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!