Fishbowl

Pros

Great marketing email tool for restaurants. They can manage much of your digital footprint and offer a very easy to use email platform.

Cons

It can be very basic at times and what you see is what you get. you can have many different accounts under a single login. you will need someone to manage this rather than do it your self.

Pros

This software is fantastic for gaining new customers. You can send out an email blast daily if you wish and they have wonderful templates for you to use and design with. They also have a great way to integrate websites to the emails, so if you have an ad about an event you can link the picture to the website. All your customers need to do is click on the picture and they're taken directly to the site. They have integrations to add your social media on the email as well an your reservation system. It is great for the customer because it limits the steps and they can click directly on specific parts of the email to get where they need to do. You can easily add new members in a large document or one by one as well. I really like the schedule feature as well. You can schedule all your emails ahead so you don't have to go back and try to send them daily. There is just a great amount of integration here so you can work on your social media and emails all in one spot! Highly recommend using this software for restaurants, where you have lots of events and information you want to get out to the guests.

Cons

I really don't have anything bad to say about Fishbowl. A cool feature would be for them to integrate with our wifi and capture emails from that as well. We have lots of business private dining guests that hook up to our wifi for presentations and it would be great to have it sync with fishbowl and pull that email into the software.

Pros

Nothing stands out as particularly positive, its a very basic system.

Cons

Slow load times
Common errors when logging in
Not ideal for multitasking

Pros

Fishbowl has a very user-friendly platform with a lot of WYSIWYG platforms. It's fast and easy to set up emails especially if you have templates set up. The ability to preview PC and mobile views helps to ensure your email list is getting a great-looking email.

Cons

Fishbowl seems slow-to-market on important updates, like being slow to offer an adjustable template to fit varying screen sizes and a lack of innovation in the email template space. You can do cool things if you have a coder on staff, but if you don't, it takes a long time for them to build you a template.

Pros

This is a fantastic marketing tool. It will give you a wealth of knowledge so you can better position your company to get the most value for your buck.

Cons

Time consuming. You have to work for the information by keying in guest information or mailing in sign up cards.

Pros

Ability to manage inventory, invoices, POs, etc. all from one platform

Cons

Fishbowl has been a struggle from the start - it is a fairly expensive product and we expected so much more. The functionality is not nearly as user-friendly as we had hoped, and the integration with QBO is awful! We integrated for invoicing, but spent more time trying to figure out and fix what Fishbowl pushed to QBO than if we entered it manually, so we turned it off. Depending on if something is marked Fulfilled, or Fulfilled and Paid, etc, it pushes an invoice, or a sales receipt. It's hard to keep up with the inconsistency. You almost need invoices completely fulfilled and paid before it's great to push to QBO. There also doesn't seem to be great reports to pull to see the bigger picture, which makes it tedious.

Pros

Doing Po's and receiving inventory with lots was very good. It has good ways to track customers, PO's etc.

We also used the max, min feature to keep inventory on hand under control.

Cons

I didn't set up clearing accounts and they didn't have that function for shopping cart. All invoices were brought over into QB's where I had to match each day's credit card transactions.
We took several months to set-up all then inventory items which kept us from going live. We were able to populate the website syncing items and inventory back and forth when doing set-up.
It was not easy to match the pulled orders to the inventory lot number. Also a lot of adjusting inventory was always throwing the numbers off in accounting software.

Pros

The software takes a while to get used to. The buttons are in weird places and are kind of confusing. I like that we have controls in place for purchasing and receiving. The trainers were amazing.

Cons

Not so easy to fix simple receiving mistakes. Wish there was an audit trail to see which users were making mistakes.

Pros

- excellent for inventory management
- able to sync with other programs for order integration
- affordable option compared to others

Cons

- not incredibly user friendly
- additional modules can get expensive
- "old fashioned" look

Pros

It was the software that all of the other things we use integrate with.

Cons

It is confusing. I feel like every time I log on things are different.

Pros

It's easy to use for email marketing and they have templates plus drag & drop editor if you do not have email design experience

Cons

The customer service isn't the greatest. There's no live chat and when you email them, it can sometimes take a couple of days for them to respond and most of the time I need support immediately which I can't get.

Pros

Fishbowl is pretty user friendly. We used this software to send monthly e-blasts to our customer base. There are options for adding photos, hyperlinks, unsubscribe, etc.

Cons

Ultimately, we thought the templates were too dated and we weren't happy with how our mailing list translated from Open Table so we ended up switching providers.

Pros

Great functionality for restaurants: Ability to segment by store, set up triggers based on store or region, and manage database in very segmented ways

Cons

UI is extremely dated and difficult to navigate. Triggers are cumbersome and often lacking in functionality. Customer support is not good. Despite having many features on its face, most of these features are bare-bones and do not function the way you would expect.

Pros

Price is good. Email software is easy to use. Navigation is simple. Dashboard is self- explanatory.

Cons

Review monitoring and social media features are very basic. I have found using other social media scheduling programs to be more valuable.

Pros

The opportunities are endless, making it suitable for a very broad variety of businesses and industries

Cons

The layout of the program looks old and outdated, making the learning process feel more tedious as well as time-consuming

Pros

Quick and easy to create articles. No problems uploading images. Schedules on time. Good temples for holidays

Cons

Customizability to create a templet is confusing. Website could be more simple and modern......

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