Groove has a slick sales pitch in which they talk about increasing traffic, conversion percentages and average order value. After lengthy discussions, their sales rep gave me an idea of what would be 鈥渞easonable to expect鈥?in sales increases for our engagement level within 3 months or so. That sounded great and they knew Magento (our shopping cart system), so we signed up. The level of sales increase that the sales rep and I discussed never did materialize.
Groove is run like 3 separate companies with a Development arm, a CPC arm (Adwords, etc) and a Marketing arm. We ran into their own internal 鈥渞ed tape鈥?multiple times when trying to get projects finished since we did not have a monthly billing engagement from every department. They did not want to transfer hours from one department to another.
The time it took to schedule out and then start projects with their development team was far too long for our liking. It occasionally took weeks to get a project on the schedule, much less started. Their development team had quoted us on various 鈥榣arger鈥?projects throughout our 18 months. Based on their time estimates (they charge by the hour and quoted projects in hours it would take to complete), they were well above other development companies we looked at for the same projects with the same details. We used other companies for several of those projects and they came in on budget (much less than Groove estimated).
We repeatedly asked for granular accounting of time spent on our account to see where our 20 hours of marketing and 10 hours of development went each month. They only gave us monthly reports of metrics with 鈥榖road brush strokes鈥?on where they spent their time (listing out projects that they were working on / finished), but did not tell us how many hours were spent doing what.
I won鈥檛 get into specifics about the last 30 days as it鈥檚 a long story, but let鈥檚 just say it ended poorly. I would never have hired them if I knew then what I know now. They did not meet my expectations for results and were overpriced in my opinion.