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On behalf of everyone here at PowerReviews, I would like to say “Thank You” to Jay Shaffer for his passion, dedication and amazing accomplishments during his time as our VP Worldwide Sales and Marketing. His animated and uplifting personality will certainly be missed in this office, but we are excited to see what lucky adventure Jay will lead to success next.

Yesterday marked a big day for PowerReviews. We launched the next generation of Buzzillions.com. You may have read about it in yesterday’s Mossberg column in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Finding the Right Product Review for You“. I wanted to share with you the key enhancements we made and lessons we learned in the research and testing process that I believe can help you take advantage of the PowerReviews review solution. Keep in mind that the lessons we learn on the real-life way users engage with reviews on Buzzillions helps us better prioritize functionality in our PowerReviews solutions.

Starting about 9 months ago, we conducted a number of research and usability studies to understand the psychology of purchase decision making and how customer reviews fit into that psychology. We learned some very basic but extremely important things that guided our design and development efforts:

• The problem that reviews solve is “the fear of making a mistake“, which they can’t afford (especially in today’s economy), and “the pain associated with returning a product when they do”.

• As a result, what people look for the most in reviews is “seeing the downside of a product” in order to make a balanced decision on whether that downside is relevant to them (e.g. a bad instruction manual may not matter to technically savvy people).

• Therefore, Cons are key. Or shall I say “Cons are King“. People don’t believe any product is perfect. If consumers don’t see cons or negative comments in at least some of the reviews, they are suspicious of the reviews, and are driven to continue on in their research process.

• If they do see cons, negative comments or less than perfect ratings, consumers are then able to feel “complete in their research” (like a switch has been flipped), and they are ready to transact with the retailer.

With this in mind, we did a complete re-design of the site and added several key features to help users feel like they’re getting the complete story (positives and negatives), and can feel complete in their research.

Features we added:

• Buzzillions Rank – To know how a product stacks up against the rest, every product on Buzzillions has a “Buzzillions Rank” – a score that incorporates the star rating, number of reviews and credibility of the reviewers. A 5-star product with just 1 review is not likely to be the best product. In addition, a star rating on its own is not definitive. For example, a 3.6 star rating for a Handheld GPS device is actually the lowest ranked product in that category.

• Affinity Reviews – Customer reviews are now organized by affinity groups so shoppers can read reviews from people most like themselves. For instance, if you’re buying a gift for your sister who just had her first baby, you can read reviews for Jogging Baby Strollers just for “First Time Parent”.

Features we enhanced:

• Review Snapshot® – Our research shows that the Review Snapshot is considered a big time saver in the research process, allowing shoppers to scan dozens of products before they drill down to read individual reviews. We re-designed the Snapshot to make the Pros, Cons and Best Uses easier to read at-a-glance (column format, high to low), and put Cons on the same level as Pros, so it appears to get “equal treatment” (to make sure they see the negatives).

• Affinity Recommendations (aka Social Navigation) – We made Affinity Recommendations (the ability to get recommendations from “people like you”) more prominent and easy to use at the top of the product listings on category pages.

• “Most Helpful” as Default Sort – We made “most helpful” the default sort for reviews, which displays the most credible reviews first. This increases the chance they’ll see negative feedback along with the good. Usually “rants” are not voted very highly, so it gives the balanced and helpful reviews the highest visibility.

We will be tracking the response to all of these enhancements on Buzzillions and are looking forward to sharing the findings with you. In the meantime, I think you might find some of the insights in the WSJ article pretty interesting, especially relating to affinity reviews and recommendations, or as they put it “culling the most appropriate product reviews for people based on personality traits.”

Now, if you would indulge me, I wanted to send a huge “Thank You” to all the people at PowerReviews for a job well done! This has been the most comprehensive team effort I’ve ever been involved in with every individual person in the company participating in a significant way, and we’re all excited about the “early returns” from the effort.

Going forward, you will see many different people from PowerReviews share their learnings and insights on the new “PowerReviews InSite” blog including my team member Yury Polnar, who leads the market research efforts at PowerReviews. Until then, if you’d like to send me comments, please email me: “andy [at] powerreviews [dot] com”

Andy Chen
CEO