BusinessOnBot Review: Does BoB Serve D2C Brands Efficiently?

Sourabh Upreti
Sourabh Upreti
December 1, 2022

Are you looking for a perfect conversational marketing tool for your D2C store? Should BusinessOnBot be the right tool for you to get the ROI you expect from your WhatsApp marketing campaigns?

Let’s dig more into  BoB in today’s BusinessOnBot review. You’ll learn everything you need to know about BoB.

At the end of this post, you’ll be able to pick the best tool for your D2C store’s needs.

Note: In this review series, we’ve already covered other important tools as well. Do check them out.

1. Our review of WATI for D2C brands
2. Zoko’s review as a WhatsApp marketing tool
3. LimeChat’s review for Shopify stores
4.
Interakt’s offerings to D2C stores
5. DelightChat's Review for Shopify stores


BusinessonBot Review 2023:

What is BusinessOnBot (aka BoB)?

If you don’t know already, BusinessOnBot is an end-to-end WhatsApp-based communication platform for businesses. It helps businesses run end-to-end marketing on WhatsApp via chatbots, automated sequences, & bulk messages.

BusinessOnBot's Agent Support Dashboard

Let’s now make things much simpler & dig deeper into its offerings.

Does BusinessOnBot have all the D2C-specific features?

(rating 2/5)

BusinessOnBot offers D2C brands with some features for marketing, customer support & chatbots. But is it exhaustive enough? 

Let’s dive in and find out.


Marketing features offered by BusinessOnBot

Abandoned cart recovery campaigns: You can set up automated cart recovery messages on WhatsApp for users who’ve not completed the payment. You can also offer some additional discounts to make customers complete the purchase. These campaigns can help you increase revenue.

Segmented WhatsApp broadcast: WhatsApp broadcasts let you launch personalised marketing campaigns directly to customers’ WhatsApp inboxes. This personalised campaign enables you to offer discounts, and collect product reviews & feedback.

Convert COD to prepaid: RTO (return to origin) is a huge problem for D2C brands. You can reduce RTO by just asking COD users to complete payment before the delivery date or time. This will not help you generate more revenue but it will reduce the operational cost that occurs for cancelled COD orders. You can set up COD to prepaid campaigns on BoB.

Order up-sell & cross-sell: This isn’t a native capability in BoB. It’s manual, time-consuming, and hard to implement. By manually segmenting your broadcast campaign, you can create upsell & cross-sell campaigns to increase your customer’s lifetime value and average order value. Since these campaigns are time sensitive, you should consider setting a reminder in your calendar to manually create these campaigns.

WhatsApp marketing features review

Essential marketing features that are missing on BusinessOnBot

While BoB offers some good features to D2C brands for marketing, it misses many important features that are essential to understanding & targeting customers to help them in their shopping journey.

In addition to BoB’s marketing features we mentioned above, BiteSpeed offers these features to all D2C stores on Shopify:


Auto upsell & cross-sell campaigns: BiteSpeed allows you to set up automatic upsell & cross-selling campaigns. With deep integration with your Shopify store, BiteSpeed makes it effortless for you to build a recommendation engine. 

This way, with just a click of a few buttons, your store now has a recommendation engine that suggests your buyers buy new and relevant products that can boost your LTV & AOV.

Photo review collection: You can automate the review collection via WhatsApp. Based on your set-up time interval, customers will receive a message on WhatsApp to share their experience with the product they bought. This campaign also allows you to collect photos & videos of the products from the customers.

Analytics on campaigns’ performance: Monitoring each campaign's performance is crucial for any marketer. BiteSpeed helps you monitor essential metrics such as the number of subscribers, opt-in rate, total revenue generated, and number. of orders, campaigns’ CTR and more.

Opt-In tools: Subscriber growth is essential to marketing across industries. For D2C brands, subscribers are even more critical to driving repeat purchases. You can run campaigns to engage, retarget, upsell, and cross-sell, all of which can help you generate more sales & revenue.

BiteSpeed’s opt-in tools include:
1. Persistent Discount Widget
2. Visual Pop-up
3. Spin The Wheel Pop-up
4. Checkout Widget

Include discounts & coupon codes along with these opt-in tools to sales count for your store while simultaneously getting them subscribed for future communications.

Retarget pre-checkout: BoB doesn’t allow you to retarget visitors before checkout. That means you miss out on 90% of the potential sales. BiteSpeed lets you retarget people who have added to the cart, but not checked out. Similarly, you can retarget people who only viewed a product but did not even add to the cart.

Sales attribution: The KPI for each marketing campaign is the revenue it has generated. Sales attribution on BiteSpeed allows you to monitor exactly that. Sales attribution helps you monitor metrics including Average Order Value & Revenue Generated with each campaign. As a D2C marketer or owner, this feature can help you save time while measuring the campaigns’ results.

These features are essential for any successful marketing campaign. They help in re-engaging, retaining and re-targeting customers and generating more sales & revenue.

Missing out on these essential features can increase costs for all three stages of the purchase cycle (Acquisition, Purchase & Retention). 

Chatbot & chat automation features On BusinessOnBot

WhatsApp catalogue: BoB allows you to set up your store catalogue on WhatsApp. Customers can check out your products & start adding them to the cart directly from your WhatsApp Business number.

WhatsApp chatbot: If you need complete chat automation for sales & support, you can ask BoB to build & integrate a chatbot on your WhatsApp Business number. A chatbot helps you automate sales & support 24*7 and makes support efficient. It can help handle basic queries while live agents can focus on complex problems & queries.

chatbot & customer support features review

Missing automation features on BusinessOnBot: a deal breaker

Flow Builder: Unlike BiteSpeed, BoB doesn’t allow you to build & customize a WhatsApp chatbot on your own. You’ve to rely on BoB’s team to make any big or small changes to your chatbot. This can be a huge deal breaker for your business if you’re planning to launch or tweak your campaigns.

For e.g, You may want to launch a quick festive or a trend-based campaign for a high-ticket item to shoppers who’ve certain requirements. So, you need to put all these possible queries into your chatbot flow to make your sales & support system efficient & engaging.

But with BoB, if you’re on a low-tier plan, it can take up to 1-2 weeks before their team adds your requirements to the flow. This means you’ll miss out on a low-hanging revenue-generating opportunity. 

BiteSpeed on the other hand offers you a complete flow builder that helps you customise your WhatsApp chatbot in real time & based on your requirements. 

Customer support-related features On BusinessOnBot 

Agent Support Dashboard: BusinessOnBot offers a live chat dashboard that can be used for offering customer support over WhatsApp. Businesses can check each agent’s performance, workload & resolution time.

Assisted Shopping & creating carts: BoB allows live agents to assist shoppers on WhatsApp. Agents can also add products to shoppers’ carts if they ask.

Canned messages/ support automation: BoB also allows the support team to set up basic chat automation/quick replies for FAQs and general queries & chat flows.

BusinessOnBot doesn’t offer these support dashboard features

Multi-channel support inbox: BoB is a WhatsApp-only solution that doesn’t allow customers to integrate their support inbox with their other marketing channels such as Email, Facebook, and Instagram. This means D2C brands are limited to WhatsApp-based support on BoB.

BiteSpeed allows you to support customers across channels from a single support inbox. It also lets you assist buyers by quickly creating carts and collecting payments with a single click to help you generate more sales & revenue.

Unlimited Agents: Unlike BiteSpeed, BoB doesn’t offer unlimited agents for support. You’ve to buy additional seats when you scale up your support team.

Other Essential Features Missing On BusinessOnBot

Similar to WATI & Interakt, BusinessOnBot is a WhatsApp-only solution.
If your buyers explore your products across other platforms like email, Instagram, and Messenger, you'll require other platforms to set up support & marketing for these channels. This will add more to your marketing costs & would lower the efficiency.

Read: Why is BiteSpeed the best alternative to Interakt?

A free trial is not available. It doesn’t offer a free trial if you want to explore products & features before making a purchase.

The Shopify plugin is missing. BoB doesn’t offer a dedicated plugin for Shopify & other ecommerce platforms. That means you can not integrate your store seamlessly into WhatsApp. You have to contact their team which may attract additional charges.

BiteSpeed offers a complete multi-channel support inbox, chatbots & deep WhatsApp marketing features like segmentation, up-sell, and cross-sell (which WATI, Interakt & BoB miss) for Shopify stores under a single dashboard. 

Book A Demo with BiteSpeed & learn more.

BusinessOnBot pricing structure

(rating 3/5)

BusinessOnBot offers 4 pricing tiers among which the base plan starts at INR 4900 + taxes.
It also helps businesses to pick a custom plan based on their requirements.

Pros

BoB’s base plan offers essential features such as re-targeting workflows, WhatsApp shop & a green tick verification.

Cons

BoB’s base plan doesn’t offer all the essential marketing features including interest-based targeting, branded content & acquisition tools. If you’re keen to launch personalised WhatsApp marketing campaigns that generate high ROI & revenue, you’ve to get on a more expensive pricing plan.

As a WhatsApp-only solution, competitors like Interakt & WATI offer affordable plans compared to BusinessOnBot.

Unlike BiteSpeed, BoB doesn’t offer you 1000 free WhatsApp conversations each month.

Onboarding & setup on BusinessOnBot

(rating 2/5)

If you require a customised plan, onboarding on BoB can take at least 2-3 weeks. BoB’s product interface doesn’t showcase all the features. You need to contact their team each time you want to add new features or integrations according to your requirements.

It’s important to note that BoB doesn’t offer personalised onboarding in its base plan. 

Customer Support Offered By BusinessOnBot

(rating 2/5)

BoB has mentioned on their pricing that they provide personalised support, dedicated CSMs & WhatsApp groups only in the top-tier business plan. That means a majority of the clients are relying only on email for support.

Competitors like BiteSpeed offers 24*7 dedicated support via WhatsApp for all clients irrespective of the plans they have.

Targeted ideal customers for BoB

BusinessOnBot targets all businesses that are looking to explore WhatsApp majorly as a communication & support channel. 

It doesn’t serve the purpose of a multi-channel marketing & communication platform that D2C brands seek for their marketing campaigns to ensure the desired ROI.

Bob isn’t also a pocket-friendly solution considering it only serves WhatsApp. Only a highly-priced business plan on BoB makes sense for complete WhatsApp-based marketing.


Final comments on BusinessOnBot’s offerings

(rating 2/5)

Considering BoB’s offerings v/s pricing it’s clear that the tool is not a value for money. BoB doesn’t offer a multi-channel support solution which makes it very hard to recommend for D2C brands that run campaigns across channels including Facebook, Instagram & Email.

For WhatsApp Business features, Interakt offers similar features at much lower pricing (bear in mind that even Interakt doesn’t offer a multi-channel support solution).

Even on the WhatsApp marketing front, similar to Zoko, BoB lacks essential features such as tracking user journeys using UTMs, pop-ups, pre-checkout retargeting, upselling, and cross-selling campaigns. 

If you’re looking for a multi-channel marketing solution for your D2C store, neither BoB nor Interakt will be the ideal solution.

Looking for a BusinessonBot alternative that meets your Shopify store’s needs? Join a no-strings-attached demo to explore how BiteSpeed can drive up to 20% more revenue to your Shopify store.

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