For any online storefront owner, getting some good feedback and honest praise is a huge boon to their business. However, trying to display every tweet or post from social media users is difficult – and that’s where Ghana’s Kudobuzz comes in.
Kudobuzz is the main product offered by Nevahold, a startup that made a name for itself with its original product, also called Nevahold. It allowed social media users to pool together their customer service complaints in a bid to attract the notice of large companies, and hopefully prompt the companies to take action.
Nevahold has since pivoted away from the complaints product it launched in 2012, coming up with Kudobuzz in 2013. Its new app serves the ecommerce stores of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) instead, allowing them to collect positive feedback, compliments, and comments from satisfied customers from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users and post them on their ecommerce site.
The app currently boasts a five-star rating on Shopify’s app store from about 90 users – not bad for an app from a startup of just five people. The company is currently working with MEST, an incubator based in Accra, Ghana. It provides funding and mentorship to startups in software as a service, consumer Internet, commerce, digital media, and IT for healthcare.
“Brands want social approval for their products. If you buy something from a store, and you show it on a website, it’s like wow, this is peer reviewed and verified,” says Kena Amoah, Nevahold’s CEO. “And by putting reviews onto a website, this new content helps the brand with the need to drive organic traffic.”
But beyond pulling social reviews onto a storefront, it gives SMBs the ability to choose which reviews they’d like to highlight on their site. It also allows them to ask customers for social reviews every 10 days or so, showing them which customers have written up quick reviews and which haven’t.
The startup plans to add a new feature for ecommerce site owners next month, allowing them to see which social reviews have driven the most conversions.
Although Nevahold is based in Ghana, ecommerce is actually relatively limited there, adds Amoah. That’s due to the fact online payments are scarce there, as well as a dearth of payment and delivery systems. So for now, Nevahold is turning its attention to customers in Canada, the U.S., and Australia – and even though its customers may be in completely different time zones, Amoah says customer support is available pretty much “23/7” – which is one reason he feels Shopify users have rated Kudobuzz so highly.
Kudobuzz currently only compatible with the three social networks mentioned, though it’s available for ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Big Commerce, TicTail, Storenvy, and WordPress. Pricing-wise, it offers a free plan, as well as plans for $10 a month or $20 a month.