Zoey Review

Compared to their competitors, Zoey is average. However, if you’re specifically looking for a B2B eCommerce solution, Zoey delivers. They have great features with lots of business-to-business specialty tools that will allow you to manage your B2B orders with ease. You can quickly upload products, fulfill orders, manage various shipping types and do much more, all while simply using the built-in features. Zoey may not be the highest performance eCommerce platform with the largest selection of features, but when seeking a B2B eCommerce solution, Zoey really delivers outstanding results.

Ease of Use

Zoey offers a clean and simple dashboard comparable to most of the other simple-to-use website builders online. This simplicity of use allows you to rapidly set up your website, even if you have no coding skills or never used an eCommerce platform in the past. Their dashboard will present you with a walkthrough tutorial upon first launching it, which walks you through every step of setting up your online store. A ton of features are available on the left-hand side of the dashboard. Each feature is well identified with straightforward labels, allowing you to understand every feature built into this platform quickly. Overall, Zoey is simple to use and is quite comparable to other similar platforms.

Functionality

When it comes to features, Zoey is very comparable to the competition. They have numerous tools available in tons of different categories, including marketing features, product management tools, shipping services, SEO tools, and more. As a business-to-business eCommerce solution, they also have some B2B specialty features not found in other website builders, such as wholesale orders, bulk orders, customer grouping, and more. Some of their built-in features are quite the best in the industry, but they deliver excellent features with great functionality. Unless you’re building a massive enterprise-level online marketplace, you should be quite satisfied with their features.

Customizing your experience is easily done on eCommerce platforms with the use of apps or plugins. Zoey does provide you with apps that allow you to make the experience better. While they don’t have a massive selection to choose from, most of them are geared towards B2B sales. Chances are, you’ll only be using Zoey if you plan on selling business-to-business products, so their apps are pretty decent. Most of their apps are free to install, but some of them require you to pay. Overall, the cost of these apps is pretty average for the industry. Unless you plan on building a very custom user experience, the apps at Zoey should satisfy your needs for B2B sales.

When it comes to picking a theme, you’ll want many options. If hundreds of thousands of users are on the same platform and there are only a handful of themes, chances are, there will be many websites that look just like yours. Unfortunately, Zoey doesn’t have an extensive choice. In fact, they have less than 10 available free themes to choose from. To make matters even worse, the free themes they do have are low in overall quality. Therefore, you’ll probably want to customize them quite a bit. The positive side of designing websites at Zoey is their easy to use the designing tool. You can quickly make sites look entirely different by dragging and dropping elements anywhere. Easily resize elements by dragging their boxes to make them smaller or larger. Overall, Zoey makes it easy for you to design beautiful websites, but their choice of free themes is limited, so if you don’t want to do much customizing, you’re out of luck.

The speed and performance of your B2B marketplace will have a huge impact on customer retention and sales. Zoey delivers slightly above average loading speed with a few optimizations in place. Still, you will have to perform certain optimizations yourself if you really want to make the most out of their platform. Uptime is hard to determine due to the lack of their uptime reporting page, but they guarantee 24/7 monitoring of their infrastructure. Unfortunately, we noticed that they hadn’t reported anything in the past 3 months when looking for recent incident reports. This leads us to believe that they do not update their status page very often, making it once again quite difficult to know what to expect in this department. Overall, Zoey delivers average speed and performance but isn’t the best for updating their users about updates, maintenance, or incidents.

Uptime

One of the important things you’ll want to look into when choosing a B2B eCommerce solution is their uptime. The last thing you want is to have your platform constantly crashing right when clients are about to purchase bulk orders from your store. We searched all over the Zoey platform and through their social channels, but we could not find any uptime report. However, they do state the following on their website: “We monitor our infrastructure 24×7, offer sitewide HTTPS and PCI compliance, so you never have to worry about your store’s security.

Incident Frequency

While Zoey does not offer uptime reporting, they provide us with a status page that lists the previous incidents. This allows you to keep an eye on platform issues as well as being able to know when they are performing maintenance. However, they have absolutely nothing listed for the past 3 months. This leads us to believe that they either have the most stable eCommerce platform globally, do not take the time to list any issues on this status page, or update their platform very often, which causes fewer things to break.

Speed

We’ve tested multiple websites running on the Zoey platform to determine how quickly most of their websites load. Loading speed is one of the most important aspects of running an online store - research has shown that a fast website converts much better. The sites we tested were well optimized for speed, with most pages loading in under 2 seconds. They had many optimizations in place, but a few improvements could have been made, such as adding expiring headers and making fewer HTTP requests. However, these optimizations can easily be made by users with basic coding skills.

Knowing that your eCommerce platform is waiting by your side at all times, ready to assist is crucial. As a B2B merchant with an online store, you’ll want to rest assured that everything is always up and running smoothly. This can only be achieved with a superb support team. Unfortunately, Zoey does not offer the best support assistance in the industry. In fact, they are below average in most areas. For instance, they do not offer any direct email address and don’t have any live chat support. You will need to rely heavily on their ticketing system for most tech inquiries, which can take hours to get a response from and does not provide the personal touch that most merchants would expect. Phone support is available during business hours, but they cannot answer more complex inquiries since you’ll be speaking with a sales team. Overall, Zoey is good for companies with basic assistance requirements, but if you plan on needing immediate assistance at any given moment, Zoey isn’t the best available option.

Support Availability

Zoey provides limited support availability, making it difficult for you to resolve highly urgent issues quickly. They only offer ticket support and phone support with no direct email assistance or live chat. Furthermore, Zoey only provides support for phone and tickets from Monday to Friday, 9 am to 6 pm EST time. This only provides you with a few hours of support per day, making their support availability well below average. However, if you need emergency support, you can choose “Urgent” when submitting a support ticket, and they will usually respond to your inquiries much sooner.

Speed of Response

The lack of multiple support channels makes Zoey’s ticketing system quite full at all times. This results in longer wait times than you would expect when using other eCommerce solutions. Some of our support ticket inquiries took several hours before getting a response, even when contacting them during open business hours. Urgent support ticket inquiries took an average of 15 to 45 minutes. They offer numerous ways to find information by yourself, including community forums, knowledge base, and tutorial guides. However, if you need immediate assistance, Zoey does not deliver.

Friendliness & Helpfulness

When attempting to contact the support staff at Zoey, we made sure to consider the helpfulness and friendliness of their team members. Overall, basic inquiries were dealt with easily, and most of the staff members were friendly. However, more complicated issues did not receive direct assistance and were escalated to higher-level support teams. This caused us to have to wait even longer before getting a response to our inquiry. Overall, it was a good experience, but there are many alternative eCommerce solutions online that provide far superior support teams.

Telephone Support

Phone support is available at Zoey, but it’s rather limited. They do not have a dedicated tech support team available by phone - you will only contact the tech support staff members via the ticketing system. Furthermore, Zoey only provides you with basic phone support during business hours - Monday to Friday, 9 am to 6 pm EST. This makes their phone support below average, and you shouldn’t expect to get many issues resolved over the phone other than switching pricing plans and other sales-related issues. If you enjoy getting instant assistance by phone, Zoey isn’t the solution for you.

Email Support

Zoey does not provide a direct email address, so you will have to use the form on their website and wait for someone to get back to you. However, after initially contacting them via the email form, they will use their email address to respond to your inquiry, so you will be able to save the email address they use to contact them directly at that address moving forward. They usually respond to email form requests within 12 to 24 hours.

Overall, the pricing plans at Zoey are expensive and are much steeper than other similar eCommerce platforms. However, if you want to enjoy dedicated B2B features, Zoey delivers, so it may be worth it to plan on having business-to-business sales or even if you want to launch a B2B marketplace. With no transaction fees, you will be able to save a little money by not having to spend anything when making sales. However, keep in mind that using third-party payment gateways will add this transaction fee, so you may end up paying it regardless. If you’re looking for a B2B eCommerce solution, Zoey may be a good solution, but otherwise, you should steer clear of this expensive website builder.

Plans Pricing

The Zoey platform is costly when compared to other website builders. While the B2B specific features slightly justify the price increase, this still doesn’t explain why their services are incredibly steep. Unless you’re a wholesaler or a company that does B2B sales, you should not consider using this eCommerce solution. They have three pricing plans available, “Entry”, “Power”, and “Advanced”. The first pricing plan allows you to have 2 staff members, 25,000 SKUs, and you get email support via their ticketing system. The second plan increases to 5 staff members and 50,000 SKUs. The final plan gives you 10 staff members, 75,000 SKUs, and priority email ticket support. Overall, we weren’t impressed with their pricing structure.

Transaction Fees

While Zoey did not impress us with their pricing plan structure, they impress us with their lack of transaction fees. Most eCommerce solutions charge some transaction fee, but Zoey does not have any transaction fee, hidden or not. However, keep in mind that you will be dealing with transaction fees via that app if you install a third-party payment gateway.

Other Fees

We did not notice any hidden fees or extra payments other than the fees for apps. However, make sure you always read the pricing for each app, as they can vary greatly. Some of their apps are free to use, some require you to pay monthly fees, and some come with fees for every sale that you make. The last thing you want to do is end up paying a ridiculous amount of fees with every single sale that you make.

There are numerous website builders available online, allowing merchants to build stunning online stores, but very few of them specialize in business-to-business sales. Zoey is a few B2B eCommerce solutions that deliver a custom experience for business owners looking to sell products to other companies and businesses. With Zoey by your side, you will enjoy specialized B2B features such as being able to sell in bulk, being able to accept quote requests, grouping customers together, and so much more.

As a complete B2B eCommerce solution, you will be able to set up your entire marketplace with ease. So whether you own a factory and want to sell your services to others or even if you want to set up a marketplace that connects manufacturers with buyers, Zoey makes it easier than ever before.

Relatively new to the industry, Zoey - the eCommerce platform, was founded in 2014. They are already among the top-rated B2B eCommerce solutions online. The Zoey founder, Uri Foox, has years of experience and is also the president of Pixafy - a New York based eCommerce agency that creates custom online stores for clients.

Zoey was created so that business owners with lower budgets would be able to attain enterprise-level services. With competitive pricing, tons of useful features, superb ease of use, and all the marketing tools you could need, setting up a beautiful B2B online store take just a few clicks. Along with great functionality, Zoey also delivers stunning designs with simple backend management, allowing you to keep track of all areas of your business with ease.

While not the best eCommerce platform online, Zoey is niche-specific and targets B2B sales. If this sounds like your business, Zoey may be a great option, but otherwise, you’ll probably want to look into other eCommerce solutions. They deliver features built specifically for business-to-business sales, which allows for better management, the ability to accept bulk orders, and much more. However, Zoey does not have the best-looking themes, and they have a minimal amount of apps to choose from. Their design tools are simple to use, just like all of their dashboard. However, Zoey doesn’t deliver when it comes to supporting either. They don’t have a live chat, and their only two available support channels (phone and support tickets) are only available during business hours. If you need a B2B eCommerce solution, Zoey is worth considering - for all other types of online stores, consider something else.