We have previously always used the Kingsumo Wordpress plugin, so we were excited to snap up this lifetime deal. After reading other reviews, I was aware of certain pros and cons- including the forced branding and not being able to ask contestants for a name – but we thought we would try it anyway.

(Skip below for a summary of our pros and cons if you don’t want the full story)

We used this Kingsumo deal to run our biggest giveaway of the year, which previously attracted 8k-9k contestants each year. This year, using the new Kingsumo, we have had under 5k contestants, despite having bigger prizes and a bigger audience. A very disappointing result for the money spent on prizes.

The main issue? Most of our contestants find us on Facebook – especially with all the social shares. But the embedded version of the giveaway doesn’t work in the Facebook native browser – it comes up with an error for contestants. “Sorry, this page has expired, probably due to disabled cookies or inactivity. Please ensure that cookies are enabled in your browser”

We contacted Kingsumo about this, and the response was that they had reported the bug to the developer, and that the solution for us was to link to the Kingsumo landing page instead of our embedded giveaway. Otherwise, to ask our contestants to clear their cache and cookies – but let’s face it, most contestants will just give up and leave when the website says “this page has expired”.

So this adds to the many “cons” we were already aware of, and has left us with the decision not to use this again until these issues are resolved. We’d ask for a refund, but I’m hoping these improvements will be made since this is still a BETA version.

Honestly, I wish Kingsumo would take the pros of their Wordpress version and combine it with this. It feels like both programs are “almost” good, neither is 100% there.

So here’s my summary of PROS and CONS:

PROS
Clean interface, easy to use, easy to set up
Viral sharing. I like the added “click here each day for entries” feature (not on wordpress version)

CONS:
No option to ask for a name at all (very hard to announce a winner!)
Embedding doesn’t work in Facebook’s browser, which most contestants will try to use
It sends emails on your behalf to your contestants – you can’t turn these off or customize them
You can’t remove the Kingsumo branding, so it looks like you are using a free tool
You can’t update the terms and conditions – which we really needed to