As a company owner for over a decade, I count on software application and automation to streamline operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my focus Is GoHighLevel Good For Ecommerce.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner always wanting to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary option that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular brand-new software. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service needs, with any luck you can gain from my excruciating blunders and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small companies keep their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and clients obtain the right messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media sites kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours each week and boost income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough client partnership administration (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and supporting client relationships via effective automation devices. The system’s all-in-one technique incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly attractive for businesses looking to settle their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned dependably with very little fuss or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy things syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when every person’s talking about a brand-new device that will revolutionize your service … The lawn often looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to believe maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire technology facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of simply several of the initiative needed:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and interface layout
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– in addition to taking care of lost productivity throughout the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better long-lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to realize I had made a large blunder. The problems started accumulating quickly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish problems I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event suggestions, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Everything appeared to be functioning fine … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unimportant e-mails had actually been sent to customers who must NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I anxiously attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. But the problem continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support team, they vaguely declared “web server problems” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, since the mistakes continued taking place each morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t benefit my company. I have hundreds of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Frustrating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and difficult.
Simple tasks like editing workflows involved digging via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to take care of overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a polished product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly realized the low cost tag featured pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing Is GoHighLevel Good For Ecommerce
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the inexpensive cost for access to so many features. However I swiftly discovered this low-cost base price was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, yet just not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
Despite how much I enhanced my sending practices or attempted every repairing trick, I can barely push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards Is GoHighLevel Good For Ecommerce.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had dreadful involvement. The only point I might think that would be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, broken features, and dreadful interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial mistake. The cons significantly exceeded any kind of advantages.
No software is best, but the large volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle crucial functions properly or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after spending significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. But in knowledge, it showed me a couple of key lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Change brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing buzz around new software usually obscures bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not more difficult and messy.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins count on.
- Look for honest testimonials. Satisfied support evaluates mean much less if excessive problems indicate poor overall functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can perfectly satisfy every one-of-a-kind organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step enhancements generally surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I learned to be more skeptical of “also excellent to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the appeal of glossy new objects. The devices you make use of daily ought to gain depend on with openness and performance, not slick advertising.