PowerReviews Insider

As you may know, we launched an on-demand version of PowerReviews in December, called PowerReviews Express™, focused on small and medium-sized online businesses. Express has the same tag-based reviews capabilities that are used by our Enterprise clients, such as REI, Staples and Toys “R” Us, but at an affordable price (starting at $80/month), and with a simple “wizard-based” set-up process.

We now have over 200 Express clients, including highly vertical sites like DiscGear.com, AlpacaDirect.com and FridgeFilters.com. Our early clients are starting to experience the same benefits that our Enterprise clients have already. To get a sense for that, here’s what Jim Hobart, the President of AlpacaDirect.com, has to say about the benefits he’s seeing from having reviews on his site.

Next Major Milestone – PowerReviews Express Partners with eBay’s ProStores

I’m excited to say that today, we are announcing an event that we think will trigger the next major milestone in the adoption of customer reviews and social media in online commerce, accelerating the pace of adoption by smaller retailers and brands. eBay’s ProStores group has selected PowerReviews Express to provide customer reviews to its 40,000+ small and medium-sized business customers. We have been working closely with ProStores to integrate PowerReviews Express into their platform to make it extremely quick and easy to implement, resulting in implementation times as short as one hour.

You’re probably aware of ProStores – it’s one of the largest providers of customizable online store solutions for small and medium-sized retailers – so it’s a big statement for a leader of this size to actively encourage its merchants to adopt customer reviews, and to make it super easy for them to do so. We see this as the next big step in the adoption curve of customer reviews, started over 12 years ago by Amazon.com. Now with the majority of larger eCommerce players having already adopted reviews, the next wave is to move to smaller companies and to companies in all major product categories. And with the adoption by the leading small-business ecommerce platform provider, the next step along the adoption curve begins.