Find yourself needing customer feedback in a flash? Ever feel like you’re flying blind when making key decisions, relying on gut instinct alone? By leveraging polling software that puts you in touch with real people eager to share their opinions, you can gain a deeper understanding about your product or idea.
This review of PickFu walks you through the essentials of this crowdsourcing tool, and how you might be able to use it to your advantage when deciding on the best path forward during your ecommerce journey.
What is PickFu? 🚀
PickFu is a market research platform that allows you to run online surveys. It might be best thought of as a digital focus group, where you can gather a significant number of responses to questions that are important to your business.
This is particularly useful in some of these common scenarios:
- Deciding on a brand name
- Choosing between logo designs
- Finalizing product packaging
- Split testing listing images
- Gauging different price points
How does PickFu work? 🤔
To start collecting responses, you first begin by building the framework for your poll. This involves:
- Choosing what to ask. Trying to figure out which color is most appealing? Or perhaps looking to determine which main image people are more likely to click on? By formulating a specific question, you are able to evaluate the impact of your creative concepts.
- Deciding how many people you’d like to survey. You have the option to select a sample size of as few as 50 respondents, and as many as 500. The more people you survey, the more robust findings you can expect to assemble.
- Picking your target audience. When designing your survey, you can drill down on specific demographics such as gender, age, and income. There are over 40 of these targeting traits available. Particularly valuable to ecommerce sellers is the ability to create a custom audience of only shoppers who use Amazon Prime, for instance.
In as little as a few minutes to a few hours, respondents answer your poll questions and results are compiled. A mix of quantitative and qualitative insights are populated on the dashboard, ready for you to analyze.
PickFu Key Features 🧰
When crafting the elements of your survey, you can choose between several different polling types. There are currently four varieties of surveys available:
- Head-to-head polls come in handy when comparing different packaging or design options. You can also use this type of poll to assess how consumers view your brand or product versus a competitor.
- Ranked polls can measure the popularity of certain features or bullet points. You can request respondents to rank the importance of different attributes, and how they might influence a purchasing decision.
- Open ended polls provide general reactions to burning questions you may have. This can shed light on how customers might respond to a sale you plan on offering, or what people are seeking when shopping for a particular type of product.
- Click tests evaluate which parts of an image or web page grab the most attention. By capturing where people are clicking, a visual heat map is generated that shows you what’s resonating, and what aspects of your content might need some tweaking.
After your poll is completed, you obtain a breakdown of the results. This comes in the form of a demographic report that allows you to slice and dice answers based on the traits of your respondents.
The raw numbers are not all that you receive, however. Survey takers also provide written feedback and a few lines of reasoning. This helps answer the “why” behind the poll results, and better enables you to draw conclusions from the data.
PickFu FAQs 🙋
Who is being surveyed?
PickFu has a pool of over 10,000 individuals they rely on to answer surveys. Everyone on the panel is located in the United States and signs a non-disclosure agreement before participating.
Are there measures in place to prevent bots?
PickFu has tax information on file for every respondent, and claims to have “proprietary quality controls” such as internal rating systems and spam blockers.
Can you contact respondents directly?
Yes, you are able to ask follow-up questions if someone provides feedback that is particularly intriguing or requires a bit more clarification.
PickFu Pros ✅
- Speed: Results from surveys are delivered quickly, anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours after launching a poll, depending on sample size and complexity.
- Affordability: It presents a far cheaper option than conducting market research through a traditional firm or agency.
- Customization: You can structure all factors of a survey to your liking, from the images you upload to the demographic makeup of who responds.
PickFu Cons ❌
- Question limits: Each poll is made up of just a single question.
- Varied quickness: Holidays and weekends can impact delivery time, as not as many people are available then to take surveys.
- Potential partiality: Respondents receive a stipend to provide answers, so they are not an exact replica of a shopper browsing organically being asked to give their POV.
PickFu Pricing 💰
Signing up for PickFu is free. Under the Free Forever plan, you only pay until you actually conduct a poll, at a rate of a dollar per respondent. (There is a 50 respondent minimum.)
In addition to this option, there are also Professional and Team tiers. These are paid memberships that offer supplemental benefits and discounted rates on respondents.
Tier pricing on a monthly basis is outlined below:
The best plan for you depends on the number of polls that you anticipate running.
You can also buy credits in advance to maximize savings, and there is a convenient pricing calculator available on the PickFu website that can be used to determine your cost before purchasing.
PickFu Discount Code
🤑 Use code “CXMMERCE” to get 50% off your first poll. Sign up here.🤑
Final Thoughts 🕵️♀️
PickFu offers an innovative solution for soliciting honest, in-depth feedback. The data-driven details you can acquire from a statistically relevant sample is far superior to asking a friend or a relative for their thoughts on an idea.
Before jumping into the platform, however, it is important to consider other survey-taking tools you might already have at your disposal.
If you are an Amazon seller and brand owner, the Manage Your Experiments feature allows you to A/B test different components of your listing directly in Seller Central. But while this is a valuable resource, there are several drawbacks.
This method takes several weeks and heavy traffic (often driven by significant ad spend) to get meaningful results. You also do not have access to commentary from customers.
Another alternative is using the built-in survey tools available on social media. But while you could always post a Twitter poll, or create a survey in Google Forms and blast it out to your email list, this requires a large existing network and doesn’t account for unbiased opinions outside of your echo chamber.
The true benefit of PickFu is that it allows you to validate your vision in a controlled environment. Before dedicating a massive amount of resources to purchasing inventory, or making permanent decisions about branding, you are able to take the temperature of the market.
It enables you to replace guesswork with hard data at various stages of the product life cycle. Whether fine-tuning a prototype or optimizing a listing in order to improve the conversion rate, the ability to harness substantive feedback in near real-time provides a competitive edge.
Simply put, while PickFu is a powerful platform for conducting on-demand market research, be prepared to have to splurge for many of the add-ons and customizations to truly get the most out of it. And be warned, pricing can scale quickly. But by helping you avoid costly mistakes, it might just save you money in the long run.
👉 Get started with PickFu here