Today we announced that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office just issued a key patent to PowerReviews related to our tag-based review technology – specifically, the ability to present at-a-glance review summaries that make reviews more informative and easier to use. This is the first of seven patents we have filed around next-generation product reviews.

We believe that these innovations have enabled three major advances in social commerce:

• More informative, easier-to-use product reviews
• Social recommendations, based on a person’s lifestyle and intended uses
• Structured analytics, driving more actionable product and marketing insights

We look forward to bringing you further innovation that drives confidence and engagement for your customers and greater sales and customer loyalty for you.

For more information on our patent and the full press release, click here.

We’re both proud and honored to be able to share this news with you and look forward to bringing you further innovation in the years to come.

I’m pleased to announce that Pehr Luedtke has joined PowerReviews as CEO. This move is the next step in PowerReviews’ expansion into broad-based Social Commerce Solutions. Pehr brings a unique combination of marketing and merchandising experience at branded retailer Levi Strauss and consumer online marketing and operations experience running Epinions, the largest user-generated product reviews site on the Internet.

I will remain active in the day to day operations at PowerReviews, focusing on strategic alliances and strategy. With Pehr’s leadership and the strength of the PowerReviews team, I’ve never been more excited about the future and our ability to deliver innovative Social Commerce Solutions that truly engage, connect, and sell.

The Foundation… What’s in a Name?

When Robert, Jim, Gautam and I first envisioned PowerReviews four years ago, we wanted to find a successful model to describe what we wanted to build. Unfortunately our model is quite unique and we were hard-pressed to find something equivalent. So, instead, we looked for attributes of great companies that we wanted to emulate. The resulting codename was….(drumroll):

In a nutshell, KaGooForce is a mashup of 3 companies:

1. Kana: CRM/Email management for retailers. They pioneered the idea of harnessing customer communications (inbound support emails) to drive efficiencies across all aspect of the business. PowerReviews would do this with Reviews and Q&A.
2. Google: Uncompromising focus on innovation, simplicity and delivered value to its customers. PowerReviews delivers great technology and service, not marketing spin or hard sell-tactics.
3. SalesForce: Salesforce delivers a product with a self-service SaaS model vs. the traditional Enterprise sale with hefty Professional Services fees…and ate Siebel’s lunch despite being outspent and outnumbered. PowerReviews products are built with self-service at its core so that our clients can easily start with us and grow as they receive value.

We all knew that the name was pretty goofy (believe it or not, this was in our actual Series A investor pitch!), so we stuck with the more mundane “PowerReviews”. However, the characteristics that KaGooForce represents have truly defined our path, in terms of products, culture, and business model.

In fact, we recently surveyed our clients, and here’s a snapshot of what our clients are saying about us:

I’m truly proud that words such as “partners”, “innovative”, “service”, “enjoy”, “relationship” are used to describe PowerReviews. And I’m also excited that, with the thoughtful feedback from our 850+ clients, we are now on the forefront of this transformational “social commerce” trend.

How far we’ve come

Because PowerReviews is in the “customer feedback” business, it makes sense that we take a lot of time to listen to our customers. There are two specific things that I’ve heard very clearly from our customers recently: “innovate faster… the world is changing quickly and we need PowerReviews to help guide the way”; and “build a great business, we love what you do and want to make sure that you are a partner for the long-term.”

And so, we’ve been working really hard on both of these demands. Here are some of the results of our efforts so far:

• We have introduced 3 major new products in the past year: AnswerBox, In-line SEO and BrandConnect (as well as lots of enhancements to our core reviews solution)
• We struck a major licensing deal with Shopzilla in the EU
• Buzzillions continues to grow its share and awareness with consumers (~7M reviews, 2.5M visits/month!)
• We have added over 50 enterprise clients in 2009, including Orbitz, Advance Auto Parts, Warner Brothers, GNC and Jelly Belly
• We launched PowerReviews Express to serve small-to-mid-sized retailers…with over a dozen partnerships such as eBay Prostores, Shopify, Infopia, Zoovy, BrandLabs, and Shopatron

It’s truly been a banner year for PowerReviews on all levels. The (not so) amazing thing is that all of these successes were driven by our customers, who freely and thoughtfully gave their ideas to us. Thank you!

What is Review Accelerator?  It is a simple and easy way for PowerReviews Express clients to send follow-up emails after their customers purchase a product, inviting them back to review.  Review Accelerator is the result of years of optimizing the format, design, and process to maximize the response rate and quality of reviews with hundreds of our Enterprise clients (to achieve response rates as high as 15%).  We take care of all the complexity and implement the best practices for you.

Why is Review Accelerator™ so important?  Quite simply, without a well-implemented follow-up email program, you won’t get enough reviews.  Our research shows that 74% of customers believe that four reviews per product is the minimum needed to make an informed buying decision.  Review Accelerator can help you achieve this milestone 10 times faster (in 1-2 months instead of 1 year).

With the addition of Review Accelerator, we believe PowerReviews Express provides a complete review solution that will exceed your expectations.  You not only get our unique tag based solution that consumers prefer 2-1 over stars and comments, but a program that accelerates your review collection.  It is the fastest and simplest way to reap the benefits of reviews on your site.

What does this mean to a Shopify client?  We took an easy implementation and made it downright simple.  The usual integration process has three steps.  The first step is to upload a product feed.  With Shopify, we pull it directly from the Shopify platform with a click of a button.  The second step is to select the appropriate “write-a-review” forms for the product categories (that’s important because we have product-specific review forms with tags for the “pros”, “cons”, “best uses” and “reviewer profiles” that relate to each category).  Since this is very straightforward, we didn’t need to simply it.  The final step is to put our JavaScript code on their pages in order to display the review content.  With input from their CEO, Tobi Lütke, it was decided that their technically-savvy merchants would have the option to select exactly where to display their customer reviews.

Last, but definitely not least, we are about to launch a fully automated “Follow-Up Email” program with Shopify — automatically sending their clients’ customers an email 3-4 weeks after their purchase asking them to review the product.  Why is this a big deal?  As many of you know, a review solution on its own doesn’t guarantee success.  All of our ROI studies indicate that review volume is the primary driver of sales uplift, and follow-up email drives 95% of that review volume.  (one such ROI study is with Netshops)

So, welcome Shopify merchants to the PowerReviews family!  We are excited to partner with Jaded Pixel to offer you our award-winning review solution for Small and Medium-Sized Retailers fully integrated into your eCommerce Platform.

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.

]]> http://blogs.powerreviews.com/2009/03/11/a-big-step-for-us-and-small-retailers/feed/ 0 http://blogs.powerreviews.com/2009/02/26/usability-experts-share-tips-and-findings-on-customer-reviews/ http://blogs.powerreviews.com/2009/02/26/usability-experts-share-tips-and-findings-on-customer-reviews/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:59:46 +0000 Darby Williams http://blogs.powerreviews.com/?p=427 A posting on VKI Studios’ official company blog today, discussed the value that a “customer-facing, independently-moderated [customer review] system” brings to the online shopping experience.

A joint client of ours – PetWellBeing.com – had an in-house testimonials engine on their site and decided to enhance their system by implementing the PowerReviews customer reviews solution in an attempt to overcome two challenges:

1. Adding new testimonials was a lot of work, and therefore didn’t get done frequently enough
2. Some customers probably doubted how representative or authentic the testimonials were, as they were clearly hand selected by internal staff

Here’s an example of a past product testimonial:

Conversion Rate Increase:

After just a few months of launching reviews on PetWellBeing.com, “The results exceeded even our wildest expectations, ” writes Michael S. from VKI Studios. PetWellBeing.com has collected dozens of (overwhelmingly positive) reviews for many of their products in that time, but what’s even more notable is that fact that, “conversion rates of all products have increased…even those products that have received some negative reviews,” adds Michael.

Handling Negative Reviews:

VKI Studios offered a final tip in their posting: “Embrace the occasional negative review. Consider it a wonderful opportunity to improve your credibility and gain customer trust.”

PetWellBeing.com received a negative review from a “Verified Reviewer” (one who has entered his/her email address but is not verified to have actually made a purchase) saying that the product didn’t work well for him/her and doubting that any of the “testimonials” on the site were real.

Despite initial fears that such a review might be from a competitor trying to tarnish the company’s reputation, that it might plant seeds of distrust in the minds of other shoppers, or that it could decrease sales for that product, PetWellBeing.com expertly decided to allow the review to stay up on their site. By allowing the review to stay, they effectively discounted the accusations in the review and showed the reviewer (and all others) that these are in fact real reviews, written by real people and that they are not unfairly filtered to only display positive comments. With this simple act of transparency, the company has shown its customers that they encourage honest feedback, regardless of the star rating, and they have reaped the benefits as a result.

As we’ve discussed on numerous past occasions, negative reviews tend to elevate both credibility and resulting sales for entire product offerings, and PetWellBeing.com is a perfect example.

Our hat goes off to VKI Studios and PetWellBeing.com for overcoming those “surfacy” fears that many companies face when implementing and maintaining customer reviews. And a much deserved “congratulations” for increasing conversion rates through fair and honest business practices.

On a smaller scale, PowerReviews has undergone its own significant changes this past year.

1. We now have more than 350 Enterprise clients (up from 150)
2. We launched PowerReviews Express to help small and mid-sized retailers take advantage of our solutions
3. We launched some some exciting new products including AnswerBox, an iPhone App to aid in-store shopping, Social Cross-Sell and Hero Images
4. We expanded internationally to the UK, France, Germany in multiple languages with La Redoute, KiddiCare, iRobot, Shop Direct and many more leading retailers
5. Buzzillions broke past 4 million reviews and established itself as a leader in using reviews to help customers make smarter shopping decisions. See the write-up on Buzzillions in the WSJ

Although there are many factors that contribute to this huge success, we truly believe that it was primarily resulted from building true partnerships with each individual client. This spans from working together to collect as many highly-relevant reviews as possible to drive conversions, to working together on experimental ideas through Buzzillions, to SEO optimization methods and Social Navigation deployments. Our original vision of creating a highly-aligned network of retailers, manufacturers and partners has solidly taken root this year.

Looking ahead into 2009, we see a lot of exciting new trends in the world of ratings and reviews (and other customer-generated content/community).

1. Reviews will be ubiquitous.  Most of the IR Top 500 retailers will have deployed reviews and that trend will continue to the smaller/niche retailers. Brands and luxury retailers will also start to adopt these technologies.
2. Because reviews will be everywhere, consumers will actively seek out those sources that are more CREDIBLE and RELEVANT…which means that consumers will become ultra-sensitized to reviews that look like “testimonials” or “marketing copy” vs. “unbiased reviews”. I also expect that more unethical marketers will try to sneak fake reviews into the system.
3. Reviews will morph into a 3-way dialog between other customers, the retailers and the manufacturer. Everything we build (Customer Reviews, AnswerBox, etc) encompass the idea of a “network” where content can be easily aggregated, analyzed, shared amongst all the partners.
4. Retailers & Manufacturers will start tapping the rich data to improve their businesses. Manufacturers will use customer feedback to improve their product development and product marketing processes. And Retailers will do the same to tune their product assortment and merchandising strategies.

What are your predictions?

On a closing note, as we contemplate all the opportunities (and challenges) ahead, I want to thank all of our fabulous clients who have worked so collaboratively to make PowerReviews successful, our network of partners who have evangelized our products and leveraged the reviews in creative ways, and the entire PowerReviews team whose talent and dedication have made this year successful.

Thank you again for another great year, and have a relaxing and well-deserved holiday!

-Andy

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!

As of this week (October 15) our 2008 Total Sales YTD (year-to-date) have surpassed total sales for all of 2007. With three consecutive quarters of record growth, sales in Q3 ‘08 were the highest quarterly total this year and in our company’s history.

Besides growing sales we have been growing and diversifying where these sales come from. We formally established our U.K. presence this last quarter with a localized sales, account management and review moderation team. We have more than a dozen sites launched in the UK already, with more to come before the end of the year.

Along with our enterprise efforts, we soft-launched PowerReviews Express, our on-demand solution for today’s smaller online merchants. We have more than 180 additional clients participating in this beta program with more signing up every day!

But the good news doesn’t stop there. Our reviews and recommendations site, Buzzillions.com had equal success adding more than 1 million reviews on more than 100,000 new unique products in the just the past 3-months.

So a BIG KUDDOS to everyone at PowerReviews for this incredible achievement and a special shout-out to our sales and Buzzillions teams for managing this continued growth in business.

So in the spirit of fully embracing opportunity, I am pleased to announce PowerReviews Express: the new ON DEMAND review solution by PowerReviews specifically designed for today’s smaller online merchant!

And, we are currently accepting applications for the beta phase of Origin. If you are a small sized retailer interested in adding customer reviews to your online shopping experience, then we invite you to use the online application for found on our corporate site.