Mailjoy VS ViewForge

Mailjoy's answer

Compared to digital channels, mail is an unsaturated channel that until recently has been generally inaccessible and lacked personalization. Mailjoy is the tool to reach customers or prospects with mail that’s relevant and timely to them. Start by customizing any of our free postcard and letter templates.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

Mailjoy's answer

We value our small, scrappy customers just as highly as our larger clients, therefore we are on a mission to bring the best tools to the masses, streamlined in a way that allows anyone to dive in and get started in minutes.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

Mailjoy's answer

When we launched Mailjoy on Product Hunt we received over 700 upvotes and ended up #2 for the day. We were ecstatic, but the real story here is that we actually launched nearly a month earlier without the fanfare of a traditional tech launch.

We had quietly launched Mailjoy a month earlier to a portion of our network through email outreach, Facebook, and Twitter. We had two asks: One was to share with people who might be a good fit for this. The other was to share the website more broadly on social. We ended getting over a dozen shares across different channels which drove 100’s of visitors to the site.

Our first customer came from a share by a friend. By launching early, we found someone who cared enough to take a chance on us right away.

As much as we learned what converted visitors to become customers, we learned what was lacking and caused people not to convert. This helped us reprioritize our roadmap before the Product Hunt launch.

I like to consider a marketing site the showroom that entices people to take a test drive. If the showroom’s offering isn’t appealing, do people really want to go for a test drive? Probably not. We quickly learned what copy we were missing, as well as how potential customers viewed the product based on how we marketed it.

Our code wasn’t perfect and we had bugs. That’s OK. Visitors and users gladly pointed what wasn’t working. P.S — We quickly fixed things.

With a successful launch on Product Hunt behind us, we have more customers, received more feedback, and once again, are reprioritizing our short-term roadmap for things that drive the most growth and solve usability challenges. I fundamentally believe that shipping as soon as possible is the key to maximizing your learnings, and, ultimately, growing faster.

Remember, done is better than perfect.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

Mailjoy's answer

Mailjoy has a ton of features to help you create mailing lists from your contacts, design beautiful direct mail postcards and letter mailers, track the results, and integrate with other tools you already use. Sending a campaign takes only minutes. Use Mailjoy for a single campaign or make it a part of your marketing toolkit.

Additionally, Mailjoy provides recipient-level delivery tracking, conversion tracking, customer attribution, and the ability to get notified the moment a conversion happens - using unique per-mailer URLs and QR codes.

We've made sending direct mail as trackable and smart as email. Never send another direct mail campaign without the ability to track your return on investment again.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import