Yotpo, the Israeli-founded reviews and loyalty platform that branched into e-mail and SMS marketing in 2020, is exiting the e-mail / SMS market and laying off around 200 employees, or roughly 34% of its workforce.
The company entered into strategic partnerships with Attentive and Omnisend to takeover its e-mail & SMS customers, which are both offering free onboarding and migration for Yotpo customers and honoring Yotpo's cheaper pricing for at least one year. Several other e-mail marketing and SMS services also came out of the woodwork to offer similar deals for migrating Yotpo's customers.
CEO Eli Weiss posted on LinkedIn:
“This was not a decision made lightly. It was made with one goal in mind: doing what’s best for our customers. Focus is hard. Letting go is harder. But we believe sharper tools, faster execution, and deeper impact, especially in Reviews and Loyalty, are what the next chapter of retention demands.”
Now Yotpo is going back to its roots and doubling down on its reviews & loyalty platform, pivoting into an integration-first platform.
Here's what's on the radar next for Yotpo, according to their announcement:
- AI-generated review summaries and sorting.
- Reviews Atlas, a dashboard that lets merchants leverage review data to identify and implement meaningful actions across PDPs, SEO, and merchandizing.
- AI-powered Multilingual widgets and insights.
- LLM search optimization, and omni-channel integrations, aiming to significantly expand their integration ecosystem.
- Next-gen Loyalty for memberships, subscriptions, and VIP programs, currently in beta.
Here's the only part of the move that pisses me off: Right now many companies are entering into their Q3/Q4 busy seasons, already planning or implementing their promotional strategies with their in-house teams or agencies. It's not the time to migrate to a different e-mail & SMS platform, which is such a crucial part of a merchant's tech stack.
For many of the smaller e-commerce merchants I work with ($300k – $3M range), they operate with extremely skeleton crews and don't have the capacity to migrate EMS platforms so quickly. If they can, it's a giant burden. In general, this is the time of year we typically make as few changes to our tech stacks as possible to avoid preventable interruptions during the season when downtime or hiccups matter most.
Flexport just made a similar move with the same deadline, and I criticized them equally for it. In general, I'm not a fan of major changes / deadlines being announced in August for the end of the year. It lacks an understanding or compassion for merchants.
Aside from that, I support and understand the strategic pivot, and I wish Yotpo the best of luck with it.