Groove

Avoid at all costs. In June of 2014 our company engaged Groove Commerce as developers for the creation of a new website using the Magento platform. Three project managers and a year and a half later, that project had not been completed because a number of outstanding items (that were within the scope of work they were hired to do), prevented us from deploying the new site. We booted them. To date we have paid nearly $ 150,000 and they have now sent us to collections for the $ 15,000 balance. After all the delay, frustration and financial harm they have caused us, you might think a reprieve of the final 10% would be a gracious gesture. Nope. By the way, they have lost their Magento certification and are no longer a Magento partner. As our Magento rep explained to me, a number of other clients have also complained. Beware.

over priced, over rated, arrogant.
A legend in their own mind.

I was very disappointed in my 18 month relationship with Groove Commerce for multiple reasons and would not recommend them to other businesses. I am also a bit surprised to see public «reviews» for Groove Commerce by Groove’s own staff members on their Facebook page (at the time of this review), including their CEO.
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 «reasonable to expect» 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 «red tape» 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 ‘larger’ 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 ‘broad brush strokes’ 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’t get into specifics about the last 30 days as it’s a long story, but let’s 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.

These guys claim that they are Magento professionals. After 8 months or so months of them trying to complete a full site redesign, they just couldn’t cut it. They did not complete the project for us, we lost a lot of revenue, and they left us in the dark to move forward. They might be good with small mom and pop sites, but when it comes to a site that has any type of large customer base, any type of large product base, or any complexity to it, they just don’t know what they are doing. They make a great presentation, and talk about all of the bells and whistles, but they are really just blowing smoke. I would highly recommend finding another company.