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If you are in sales, one of the greatest feelings comes from seeing a customer really happy with their purchase. If it is software or a service you are selling, then happiness often takes the form of a very successful, fully leveraged implementation by a customer driven at the onset to derive every benefit possible from your product, to squeeze every ounce out of the vision you shared with them during the sales process.

How do I know all this? Well, we have just such a PowerReviews customer – Onlineshoes.com.

Customer Spotlight: Onlineshoes.com

From our very first meeting we knew they “got it.” They immediately grasped the value our relevancy-based reviews solution brings to today’s online shopping experience and the impact our innovative, tag-based approach could have on what is already the widely adopting practice of selling shoes online.

Starting with the basics

Shoes need to fit. Period. And with all online shoe companies offering free shipping on returns to eliminate any concern a customer might have about ordering shoes that might not fit right, adding reviews to provide accurate sizing information to shoppers was a no-brainer. Sales go up, returns go down. The Onlineshoes.com folks, however, saw this as “a given” and the starting point for what any review solution would provide. What they were more interested in was what they could achieve beyond ensuring a proper shoe fit. Because in the world of shoes, fit is just the first, but required, hurdle to cross for shoppers – with real satisfaction being achieved when the shoes they buy are as comfortable as they had hoped or provided the traction they wanted or better yet, were the right look for that weekend barbeque or special occasion.

Onlineshoes.com realized from the start that by fully integrating our review system into their online shopping experience, our enhanced review content could address product concerns well beyond just size and fit. That’s because we gather feedback in a tag-based format around the Pros, Cons and Best Uses for each product, providing shoppers with more informative and highly relevant customer reviews. To realize the full power of reviews, though, Onlineshoes would have to leverage reviews throughout their entire shopping process, beyond just the product page. And that is exactly what they did.

Social Navigation

Well, they did it! Onlineshoes is the very first website to offer Social Navigation – the ability to narrow product selection based on feedback from customers just like them – to the ecommerce world. Because of the structured format of our review content, the terms or “tags” gathered during the review submission process can be directly integrated into site navigation, presenting shoppers with additional filtering choices to browse products and narrow product selections based on real customer feedback, In addition to browse by color or by size, shoppers can now chose to browse products that other customers have said were “comfortable” or “warm” or were great for “wet weather” – all the things you would want to be absolutely sure of before their first use.

I invite you all to experience Social Navigation first hand and see the very first instance of the future of online shopping. (scroll down past the “Colors” navigation to see Customer Feedback choices)

Onlineshoes

Finally I would like to publicly acknowledge the incredible group of folks, led by Jimmy Healey, Product Manager at Onlineshoes, who shared this vision with us and worked incredibly hard and smart to achieve this incredible milestone. Here are some highlights and accomplishments along the way:

• Pre-launch email blast to last 6-months of customers generated a review volume at launch covering 20% of their product assortment with some of the more popular products having more than 20 reviews.
• Tested subject lines in the email before committing to the Big Blast to make sure they got the highest open and review submission rate possible.
• Displaying the ratings snippet with the product on all category list pages helped promote the awareness of reviews to their shopping base, further driving the adoption or reviews which covered 30% of products within the first two months.

Realizing the vision

We have been busting at the seams to tell the world about our vision coming to life, but this functionality was launched just a short while ago and we are still gathering data and developing related metrics. For those of you that may have some of our earliest sales collateral, you’ll see that Social Navigation is a since the very beginning. We did know that we would have to be patient, though, as Social Navigation is dependent on several factors, the most important of which is review volume – including the penetration of reviews across product categories as well as the depth of reviews per product.

The cat is out of the bag

With the recent interview in February’s Internet Retailer Magazine: The Power of Customer Reviews, Jimmy Healey at Onlineshoes shared with the internet world his early findings with their implementation of social navigation.

I could go on and on and on and on about this great company but then I would never get any work done. I suggest all of you keep your eyes on these guys as I continue to expect great things from them as they find greater ways to harness the power of customer reviews across their website!

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