Lightfunnels Review – A Hosted Funnel Gem or a Dud?

So I posted this in Martech a few days ago and I was supposed to post it here for the MooCrew who aren’t in Martech, but I got hella busy since it is still Q4 after all. So……better late than never I guess!

Disclaimer: This post is NOT meant to encourage you to buy the product. This is just to give you an overview so you can decide whether or not the features included are something you can use, or to help delete that FOMO you might be feeling. It could go either way really.

☝️ Now I know people are going to be asking things like “How does it compare to Clickfunnels or Swipepages or WooFunnels or Cartflows”. However, I’m not going to talk about all that in this review because it’s too long to make a comparison in text (I may talk about Shopify from time to time).

I’ll just lay down a summary of what the product does, and you decide if you’re going to shell out $245-$2k for 1-25 domains.

Fair? Okay let’s dive in then.

📃 Overall UI/UX

I like the overall UI and UX- in fact I like it a little better than their sister brand Scalify, which had certain redundant menu options and what not. The main page reminds me a lot of Shopify’s dashboard and the side menu options are clear and concise with simple and commonly used wording. You also don’t have to jump through hoops just to navigate from point A to point B. No dark mode though, so minus points there.

⚙️ Settings/Options:

So before we jump into the page builder and all the other ‘good’ stuff, let’s talk about the (boring) settings page where you manage things like team members, integrations, branding, payment gateways, and more.
You can set your:

✅  Default template (good for niche-focused brands)

✅  Add team members

✅  Tracking codes

✅  Legal notices

✅  Payment gateways

✅  Email and SMS reminders

✅  Integrations (Webhooks)

✅  Add domains

✅  Add digital product files

👉  I like that you have granular control over what each team member has access to, but I hate that I can’t pre-define roles (aka set custom roles). I would prefer to pre-define what a “Junior Developer” or a “Designer” has access to instead of manually assigning the pages to every single team member I onboard onto LF.

👉  For tracking, you can connect your GA account, Facebook Pixel, and (NEW) Facebook Conversion API. I pushed them heavily for Conversion API earlier on because it’s almost essential for all eComm businessses these days. Shopify already had it natively integrated from the get-go because they understood just how important it is. Tiktok and Snapchat tracking looks to still be in the roadmap but you can get away with installing their tracking code manually. The one thing I still need from the LF team is to pre-assign Facebook standard events like VC, ATC, IC, APM, Pur on certain pages without us having to use Facebook’s event manager to assign the pages (Shopify does this by default).

👉  Not going to talk much about legal notices and GDPR since I’m not an expert in that area, but they do have ToS, Privacy, and Refund policy templates that you can use or easily paste your own into the pages.

👉  Payment gateways already include processers like Stripe, PayPal (hate them but yeah whatever), and CoD. RazorPay is coming soon so our Indian friends can rejoice, but do note LF will take a transaction fee of 2% if you choose RazorPay (at least that’s what I see on the dashboard). You’re able to set the overall default subaccount currency, and you can even choose to automatically switch your visitor’s local currency if you so wish – great for conversion rates, not so great for accounting and/or currency exchange loss. I would also love to see LF incorporate Stripe’s payment integrations like how PlugnPaid does- big fan of how they allow smaller payment gateways like GrabPay, which is popular in Singapore, to integrate with their platform through Stripe’s API.

👉  Emails and SMS come with a nice surprise. You can setup the messages for order confirmation, cancellation, refund, and fulfilment right in the dashboard with a good number of variables for both Email and SMS. Nifty touch so you don’t have to add on any additional tools for simple funnels. What’s surprising is that you can actually setup abandoned cart emails and SMS’ here with simple analytics of how many emails have been sent, how many carts have been recovered, and what’s the overall conversion rate for the emails/SMS’. Of course, if you want to score your visitors or run them through a complex abandoned cart + nurture sequence, then you’ll need something a hell lot more robust like Klaviyo or Autonami.

👉  In terms of integrations, it’s really not all that great. It currently only has webhooks and Zapier for platform integrators and native integrations to Mailchimp, Shopify and WooCommerce. At the bare minimum I would expect it to have Integromat, Pabbly, Integrately, and even Konnectzit for platform integrators, and Klaviyo, Vbout (😜), ActiveCampaign, and Google Sheets for native integrations. It’s also really weird that they listed their integrations under “Apps” which is on the settings page, and Webhooks on the settings page. They should just put Webhooks on the same page.

👉  The domain page is decent. You can easily connect your root or subdomain and there are indicators to show you if the domain and SSL have propagated yet or not. Simple and easy.

👉  In the digital product page, you can only add files. It’ll be a lot better if they allowed us to also add in codes (like LTD codes lol) which can be fulfilled as a variable in the thank-you/order confirmation emails.

Now that’s over, onto the other features

🛒  Products:

👉  The process of setting up a product is very similar to Shopify. Title, Description, SKU, Product Images, Offer message, Tags etc. You can also add “Feature Blocks” with a photo, headline, and description. Similar to Shopify, you can add variants of your products for people who sell products with different colours etc. Where it stands out from Shopify is you get built-in features that you only get with addons (that bloat your page) in Shopify like the evergreen timer and the sticky buy buttons. You can also do order bumps directly from the Product options page, and kickstart the process to add in things like Upsells, Downsells, and the Thank-You page before you even start customising the individual pages. There is some room for improvement WRT funnel management and processing, but I think it’s not too difficult that the layman can’t figure it out. Another interesting thing is you get to add testimonials and FAQs directly on the product page itself. I think the FAQs should have an option to be a global block so I don’t have to manually add it product by product, so maybe that’s another workflow thing they can improve on.

🌪️  Funnels (and page building)

👉  The funnel building experience is surprisingly intuitive. You match the various CTAs to upsell/downsell pages using their visual mapper and that’s it! You also get analytics on what % of people went to what page, but that’s a pretty basic function on all funnel builders. You can make it as simple or as complex as you want.

👉  The page building experience was pretty bad when I first tested it. They didn’t have text placeholders so all the text boxes were there but blank. Looks pretty barebones. They’ve since added that in (at my request so please thank me) so it’s a lot easier to visualise how your page looks like and how you can build on the existing template. You also won’t feel lost because the page builder was designed similarly to Elementor (as are thousands of page builders out there). It obviously won’t be as powerful as Elementor or even Shogun (from Shopify) but it’s workable. I also like that you can paste scripts on individual pages as opposed to Brizy’s solution, where you have to use GTM to prevent scripts from firing on certain pages. There are a few things they need to improve:

❌  Star ratings need to come with decimals/half stars. If I have a product that’s 3.9 stars, showing 4 stars might come across dodgy and 3 stars will affect conversion rates.

❌  They need evergreen timer conditions (even swipepages has this). For example when the evergreen timer goes to zero, it could redirect people to a “waiting list” form. I mean, evergreen timers are kinda shady in the marketing world but you can make it less shady by doing this.

❌  They need to have a button click to section (like how Brizy does it) so you don’t have to set the class or id manually. More of a workflow improvement really.

❌  Page autosave and version rollbacks- I used to not believe in this but it’s come to grow on me

❌  Native exit intent popups and templates. Their popup system is very basic right now, and they don’t have any templates to work with so you have to build it from scratch.

❌  No native integration to free stock/gif libraries – needs to happen

❌  They should include an integration to pay per use stock libraries as well – just for more options like how Wave.video does it.

❌  They need to include a library with the commonly used trust badges like Stripe, Visa, Masters, Amex, PayPal, SSL etc.

❌  Needs an Icon Library API (I wouldn’t ask for this if the product wasn’t so expensive but yeah)

❌  It needs a billion more page elements to be a complete page builder. I won’t go too deep into it but if Elementor requires addons, what more this?

🔎  Analytics:

👉  Very basic for now. You only get certain options like Total Sales, orders, visits, leads, CVR% etc. What I to eventually see is an analytics page that is almost as customisable as say, Oviond, where I can change how I view my data and exactly what data to display. It also doesn’t show any UTM data so I still have to use an external tool to view that even though I should be able to see their first party data. Their live view dashboard is a good attempt to look cool by displaying a 3D globe that shows real-time stats of the site visitors from various countries but ultimately falls short of displaying the data in an easy-to-see manner (who has time to scroll across the globe to view data?) I would much prefer to see the standard Mercator projection map.

👉  They do have session recordings available, but tbh nobody will have the time to view session recordings. An in-built heatmapping tool like Lucky Orange or Hotjar with summarised analytics will be far better. You don’t expect me to watch 100s of session recordings a day do you? Also, I’m not sure if session recording is GDPR compliant – it doesn’t sound like it is tbh.

🎁  Discounts:

Discounts are what separates the eComm folks from the Dropshippers. When you do dropshipping, you usually don’t have the margins to play with to give a lot of extra discounts so most DS-ers don’t focus much on discount capabilities. LF’s discount capabilities are VERY basic. Yes, you get to choose between % or fixed discounts, limit the discount usage, and limit the discount to certain products or tags, but you don’t get to:

👉  Lock discounts to certain payment gateways – I will always try to incentivise people to pay with Stripe than with PayPal 🙄  so I usually try to block all PayPal transactions from receiving any discounts.

👉  Geolocking discounts – Maybe I only want to give certain discounts to certain countries because they have regional holidays there. Yes people can use a VPN, but most people won’t.

👉  Lack of discount conditions like spending more than $X to get Y% discount etc

👉  No grandfathered discount options

👉  No free shipping discount triggers/actions

✒️ Conclusion:

So I kinda like LF, but it’s got some ways to go. The team appears to be quite dedicated and have been pushing updates (before and during the campaign, so the true test only comes after their campaign ends). It’s definitely not as it was hyped to be- SUPER MATURE BETTER THAN SHOPIFY, WOOFUNNELS, AND SLICED BREAD, but their team didn’t hype it that way- someone else did. If you need a hosted funnel builder that’s focused on 3-5 products MAX, go with this. If you need more, you should still build a full fledged store on Shopify or WooComm.

Some other random things I’d like to see from them

👉  Store credit refunds (like Appsumo)

👉 Twilio integration

👉 Split Payment options

👉 Subscriptions

👉 Robust tax collection system like Taxjar (Shopify App)

Overall rating:

For dropshipping: 8/10

For eComm: 7/10

So after all this, do you think it’s worth the pricetag?