PowerReviews Insider

This blog post guest-written by Kamran Lotfi, Product Manager for PowerReviews Express

In an ongoing effort to build and maintain presence within their industry and compete with larger retailers, SMB retailers actively seek out the most cost-effective and impactful ways to help engage shoppers, build trust and grow their business. Faced with an inherent distrust factor due to a lack of brand awareness, smaller retailers started turning to customer reviews to prove to their shoppers that they carry quality products. I was hired to explore and develop the opportunity of providing a review solution to address the very issues  smaller retailers were most concerned about.

In the past 6-months, there had been a noticeable uptick in inbound calls to the company from $10-Million online retailers and they all complained about similar issues with existing review collection options. Forced to develop an in-house reviews engine, pay for an enterprise solution or settle for a very basic and un-managed open-source solution, these retailers yearned  for something better. So we gathered some folks who were intimately familiar and experienced with the needs and limitations of SMB retailers and developed PowerReviews Express.

After speaking with dozens of small retailers who had called us early on, we heard the message loud and clear – they wanted a review solution that was easy to implement, effective at minimizing operating expenses and increasing conversions and overall sales.

Quick and Easy:

Most businesses of this size don’t have in-house developers, and if they do, they are extremely busy. That’s why we created a simple 5-step Integration Wizard for them – we took our full enterprise functionality and simplified implementation to make it possible to launch in less than a day without sacrificing any of the proven benefits of PowerReviews’ tag-based review structure. Instead of setting 7 or 8 JavaScript variables on the page, retailers can now just cut and paste a block of JavaScript code from the Wizard that is already custom tailored for them. The best part is they only need to put the code on their product page once. And since most online retailers are very particular about how their product and category pages look, we enabled them to do all kinds of customization via the UI or a CSS Style Sheet – think Google Ad Sense but for reviews. What this means, then, is you can style your review elements to your heart’s content with a single developer who is comfortable with CSS.

Fully Featured:

So with a name like Express, you might be tempted to think it has been stripped of all the goodies the Enterprise version has – We Didn’t!  SMB retailers get all the goodies including Full Content Moderation, Review Snapshots, Verified Buyer Badges and Category Specific Review Forms. Unlike open-source solutions, Express includes a 3-tier moderation service that has trained human moderators screen each review to makes sure only high quality content makes its way to your site – not “website graffiti”.  Just look at Discgear.com’s standard PowerReviews Express implementation…can you tell the difference that they are an Express client?

Plug and Play Partnerships:

An even simpler “Click-Through Integration” process was the vision we had for this solution and we accomplished that in November with Infopia – the first PowerReviews Express platform partner. We created a custom implementation work flow for all Infopia clients that steps those retailers through the entire integration, beginning to end. The best part is that since Infopia has already put the code on the page and styled it, business owners can integrate Express themselves – NO DEVELOPER NEEDED. With a couple of clicks of their mouse, a client can be up and running with Express in a matter of minutes. And Infopia is just the start. Within a couple of months, “Click-Through Integration” will be available through lots of SMB platforms.

Out of the Gate Performance:

Considering reviews have become a standard for all e-commmerce websites, we want Express to be an easy choice for the SMB market. With an enterprise-class functionality that was preferred by shoppers 2-1 over Amazon style (free form) reviews in a keynote study, SMB retailers now have a review solution that has been proven to increase trust, conversion and the bottom line. It’s no wonder, then, that PowerReviews Express has become the fastest implemented solution with more than 300 retailers signed up already!

Stay tuned for more good things from PowerReviews Express!