I saved my AddShoppers review for last in this series of Rugs USA roundup reviews because it’s difficult for me to define the company. In reality it’s a variety of products and services and you get access to most of them for a flat fee.
I met the two founders of AddShoppers at a Bronto Summit after my former employer at RosenberryRooms.com referred me to them. He told me they were doing awesome things for him and that I should check them out. Initially I thought they were just providing share buttons but it turned out to be a lot more. The thing that made it a no-brainer to try out was that they managed our popups and overlays for us which we at the time were using Bounce Exchange for. AddShoppers offered more features and are comparable in price so we did an A/B test with them against the Bounce Exchange popups and found virtually no difference. Once we gave our notice to Bounce Exchange, which turned into a nightmare with lawyers contacting me with threats of patent infringement, we on-boarded AddShoppers and started adding their features.
The way they do things there is that they give you an account manager and he or she will basically just show you the new stuff they are building or suggest improvements to your current set up and sort of guide you through what things work best. They did all the graphic designs and deploying so you literally are just having brief meetings reviewing things and giving the go ahead, so it’s a very effective way to be testing a variety of things. Aside from that you just need to test everything being deployed yourself to make sure it’s to your expectations. On a few occasions I did come across errors but they were always immediately resolved as soon as I pointed them out. From a technical standpoint all you have to do is add a simple tag to your site and then they can deploy things without you needing to do anything other than approve it.
I have to give their staff major major kudos for being available at obscene times of night and on holidays. I recall the owner of Rugs USA changing his mind on the creative for our Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving day. Mario who was my account manager actually responded and adjusted everything that morning within hours. So there’s definitely no concern for poor support with them!
So that’s an overview of the general company, now I’ll review some of the apps. There were several I didn’t use so this will be an uneven review of their whole suite.
– Overlays and popups. Like I said this was the main reason we switched to use them. We could set up and configure a variety of email popups and other overlays like header banners and abandoned cart popups with or without unique coupon codes for each impression. The sky was the limit with this feature. They would design them for us and advise us on when to have them appear and on what pages, we could also design them and send them the graphics. They also ran a/b tests on different designs, prompts, locations, etc. So they did all the labor and I just watched the results. This component alone pays for their services.
– Social Rewards. This was a cool little app that would offer a gift certificate in exchange for sharing a page on your choice of social network. So we’d offer a $5 gift certificate to you on the screen after posting the page to Facebook for example. It was used a fair amount so it’s a good way to have your customers spread the word. Of course there’s going to always be a segment of people that post and then delete it after they get the code, but the value of the people that leave it is easily worth the discount you’re offering assuming you have the margin.
– Trending Wall. This is an awesome page that automatically lists all the various products that are being posted on the various social media platforms. It’s also beneficial for SEO. For example of this click here.
– Social Analytics. AddShoppers has tons of insight into who is sharing your product on social media, how many clicks and purchases that share generated, and how influential the person is sharing it. I nerded out over this a bit when we first signed up but I admit I didn’t take the time to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do with that information, so this was an underutilized feature in my case.
Additionally they offer remarketing software, the ability to login through a Facebook account into your site, a refer-a-friend application that stores your referrals in an account until you build up enough credit to buy stuff, and a Pinterest contest application that allows people to connect to the account and participate in pin it to win it promotions. I didn’t use any of these but that’s mainly because I was pacing the roll out of each new feature and left the company last month so I didn’t get to these last features. As you can see though it’s like a kid in a candy store with them! It’s all there for taking and trying out with minimal effort on your part. They probably already offer more than this because it seems like every time I spoke with them they had some new app that they were trying out based on a customer request.
AddShoppers is month to month for the pro version (not the enterprise) and I believe they also offer a free trial, so if any of these features sound useful to you I’d highly recommend you try them out and see what they can offer. Worst case scenario you delete the tag and go back to your old tactics, but I think you’ll find more than enough extra revenue to justify the expense!
