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.

The Wall Street Journal featured a story yesterday that credited PowerReviews with helping ecommerce businesses boost customer review volume and build trust among online shoppers. The results: shoppers feel more comfortable buying online, while merchants are better able to identify problems with their products or services.

The article highlighted the success stories of PowerReviews clients drugstore.com and Diapers.com.

Drugstore.com’s 300% lift in review volume after implementing our software and launching a follow-up email campaign (a PowerReviews best practice) not only helped to lend credibility to their products, but garnered a legion of verified buyers, adding even more authenticity to the reviews. Layering on the lasting benefits of the follow-up email, drugstore.com CMO David Lonczak said that this practice helps customers receiving these requests in their inbox “feel important” and “increased our brand’s connection [to drugstore.com customers].”

Our AnswerBox solution also received an honorable mention–with a focus on its capability to help merchants “reap the benefits of input from consumers before a sale is made, by posting questions from people thinking about buying a product and the answers, including comments from other consumers.”

Bazaarvoice’s capability to link customer reviews to users’ Facebook profiles was also mentioned, reinforcing the viral nature of peer-level feedback online.  (Read about our own Facebook publishing feature – Social Megaphone.)

When consulting online reviews, a shopper’s level of comfort largely depends on feeling that sense of connection to the person making a review. Director of E-commerce Solutions at Diapers.com Josh Himwich remarks, “the most important recommender is going to be people who are in a very similar situation to yourself.” However, not all reviews solutions provide this crucial information.

The article pointed to Diapers.com’s use of our Affinity Reviews™ as a feature that sets PowerReviews apart from others in the industry. This PowerTags™ technology, unique to PowerReviews, captures structured customer feedback to help shoppers “distinguish one reviewer from another” (’first-time parent’ or ‘grandparent’), and is critical to helping to guide their purchases online.

The common denominator here: social commerce solutions that drive measurable results for businesses – through more sales and deeper customer relationships.

In the last year, my work has focused primarily around leveraging reviews and other user generated content before and after the validation stage of shopping – to attract new shoppers to their site, help shoppers sort through and find the right product for them and get more engaged with the Brand after they leave.  I wanted to share with you some of the key lessons I’ve learned in this process that will help you get the greatest sales uplift value from customer reviews.

1.  Maximize the number of credible reviews on your site

It’s no secret that the most important step to getting full leverage out of reviews is sending an automated email to invite customers back to write a review after a purchase – commonly called a post-transaction follow-up email.  This is the proven method to generate the most reviews on your site from a very credible source – your known customers!  In fact, one client recently increased reviews by 26 times by implementing the follow-up email.  Our system marks these reviews with a “Verified Buyer” badge, which creates trust among your customers.

We recommend that you send the follow-up email to all past purchasers from the previous 6 months prior to launching reviews on your product pages.  Within the first month, you should have 20% of your total SKUs have at least 1 review, with 100% review coverage for your top sellers. Further, as the Netshops Case Study shows, it’s the number of reviews per product that drives sales uplift, with 4-7 reviews per product being enough for 75% of shoppers to “have sufficient confidence to judge the product” (etailing group study of 1200 typical internet shoppers).

Did you know the follow-up email also ensures a more balanced and improved overall product rating?  Because the email captures reviews from a wider cross-section of customers, our customers have experienced a 15% increase in the average product rating across their site once they implemented the follow-up email!  If you need help, let us know.  We’ve created a tool to help you send the follow-up email.

2.  Make a great first impression

It’s one thing to collect customer reviews, but if you don’t display the reviews in a user friendly way, with an informative and easy-to-absorb review summary, you’re not getting the greatest sales impact from these reviews.  That’s why we created the next generation of our review summary, called Review Snapshot 2.0.  Initial tests showed an 18.3% reduction in product page bounce rate and a 16.7% increase in product page conversion.  Check out the Review Snapshot at Jelly Belly.

3.  Maximize SEO Benefit

Since the inception of our review solution, we’ve provided customers the ability to increase natural search traffic from customer review content via our SEO Mini-Site.  This solution leverages a set of SEO-optimized review landing pages, which drive traffic through the landing page to the product page.  Late last year, we launched our next generation SEO tool called – In-Line SEO(tm), which enables customer review content to be indexed directly on the product page itself.  Early customer review adopters, such as eBags, Newegg and Zappos, created home-grown review solutions to achieve the SEO benefit of reviews directly on the product page.  Now everyone else can benefit from this approach without having to manage the review display themselves (so you can easily adopt all the review enhancements in the future).  Check out Robert Chea’s blog post last week for more details.

4.  Take review content everywhere it can drive more sales

After you’ve spent the effort collecting credible, high quality reviews, make sure you leverage those reviews throughout your site and in your email marketing efforts.  In our case, the review content is “tag-based”, which means you can take it entirely new places in social merchandising and social marketing.

• On category pages and anywhere you list products, include the star ratings snippet.  Thirty days after adding ratings on the category page, Diapers.com experienced a 15% increase in product page views and a 14% increase in conversion.

• Highlight Top-Rated products on your site.  Check out REI’s Top-Rated products section on REI.com.  Utilizing our tags, you can also take it one step further by creating more personalized Top-Rated pages.  See Top-Rated women’s comfortable shoes for travel on OnlineShoes.com.

• Embrace Social Navigation to its fullest by adding ratings and review tags to your site navigation so people can narrow by “use” or “pro” or “lifestyle” (about me).  Check out Social Navigation implementations at sites such as OnlineShoes.com and Dick’s Sporting Goods.  For a very different Social Navigation interface, using tag clouds, check out Kiddicare.com.

• Add ratings and review tags to your email marketing campaigns.  By adding ratings to their email, Mountain Gear increased click-through by 8%, conversion by 17% and Average Order Value by 85%.  Impressive results!

5.  Take your online reviews offline

With the retail market still dominated by offline sales, it makes good business sense to bring ratings and reviews to your offline customers.  PowerReviews allows you to provide customer reviews in store with mobile applications that fully leverage the powerful Review Snapshot feature – high impact in a small form factor.  We also can suggest ways to maximize the display of customer reviews in store by leveraging both the ratings and the tags in store signage.

I encourage you to fully harness the amazing content your customers are creating for you every day.  These are just some of the ways you can do that, with clear wins for you and your customers.  As always, if you have any questions about the information shared, please contact your Account Manager.

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.

In his shopping research, Graham found his way to Kiddicare (as you might expect, a client of PowerReviews), and discovered two other innovations that were helpful in making sense of reviews for him – filtered navigation using review keywords (we call “Social Navigation”) and summaries of reviews (we call “Review Snapshots®”), both uniquely enabled by our “tag-based” approach to reviews.

I’ll let Graham describe his experience shopping on Kiddicare.com in his article, How to organise e-commerce product reviews.

To work around the “invisibility” problem, both companies created special review landing pages (or “review mini-sites”) that search engines could index, bringing a sizeable stream of new search traffic to the mini-site.  But not to the product page, and that’s the rub.  Unlike any other page on the website, the product page is the best equipped page to convince visitors to buy.  And it’s the place retailers and brands have chosen as the place to focus their SEO efforts.

Our new In-Line SEO solution brings together the merchandising and marketing power of customer reviews onto the Product Page, driving search traffic to the place it can generate the greatest sales.  And doing so without sacrificing the productivity benefits of working with an outside service provider.

33% Increase in Sales from Natural Search

I could go on and on about why it’s important to have search-friendly review content on your product page, but the results speak for themselves.  One of our first clients to implement In-Line SEO is Diapers.com, and they experienced some impressive results.

Within two weeks of implementing it, natural search traffic on Diapers.com increased by 49%.  And because all of the incremental traffic landed on the product page, search-related sales increased by 33%. A key driver of the increased sales was a 59% rise in the number of keywords driving traffic to the site. (Diapers.com did not have an SEO solution for reviews prior to the launch of In-Line SEO).

You can find more details in our In-Line SEO™ Case Study, but seriously, “WOW!”

Why not an API or XML?

You many have heard from Bazaarvoice that they offer an API to enable SEO on the product page – providing a coding interface to include customer reviews as HTML content on the product page.  If you have explored this route, you probably discovered it would change the fundamental working relationship you have with your service provider.  We know, because we have long provided an XML interface to our clients as a stop-gap SEO solution, and only 3 clients out of 300+ chose it.  The vast majority of our customers did not because 1) it required them to build their own front-end display, and 2) it required new engineering development every time we released a new feature.  And isn’t easy integration and no maintenance a key point of outsourcing?

Until now, retailers had only two choices for product page SEO — (1) “build-it-yourself” and get the full SEO benefits on the product page, or (2) outsource it to a SaaS provider and live with review landing pages.  In-Line SEO™ gives you the benefits of both.

So welcome to the new world of outsourced customer reviews, where you can have your cake and eat it too!

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/2009/03/02/announcing-changes-to-our-business/ http://blogs.powerreviews.com/2009/03/02/announcing-changes-to-our-business/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:56:50 +0000 Andy Chen http://blogs.powerreviews.com/?p=439

As a second-time entrepreneur (the first company was Fogdog, an online sporting goods retailer), I have learned how important it is to be open-minded and flexible in tough times. At Fogdog, founded by Robert Chea and myself in 1996, we experienced the go-go Internet days of 1998 and 1999, as well as the unexpected and sudden downturn in the Internet economy, financing market and overall economy in 2000. Robert and I learned then that it’s critical to be proactive during economic downswings in order to minimize their effect.

Today, we are addressing the downturn in the following ways:

• First, we have moved from a “subsidized pricing model” (where Buzzillions subsidizes Clients who share content with Buzzillions) to a “paid subscription” model, with monthly subscription fees considerably lower than other players in the market.
• Second, we have created “PowerReviews Express” a lower-cost delivery model (starting at $80/month), aimed at the 200,000+ small and medium-sized online retailers and brands, with tools to make set-up and management of reviews much more efficient – for clients and for us.
• Third, we have significantly expanded our revenue base with the launch of three new products, all of which are meeting or exceeding sales expectations.
  • AnswerBox – a question and answer solution for knowledgeable customers and staff experts to address questions posed by shoppers not yet ready to buy.
  • In-Line SEO™ – a breakthrough SEO feature that sends reviews-based search traffic directly to the product page where it generates the greatest sales uplift.
  • PowerReviews Express™ – described above.
• Lastly, we are realigning our organization and reducing our headcount by seven people.

With the revenue enhancements, investments in our delivery model, headcount reductions and the continued growth of Buzzillions, we believe that we are doing what we need to ensure we stay healthy and not only weather the storm but thrive in 2009.

A number of our clients and partners have been forwarding these stories to us with notes of disbelief – they are surprised there is still a fear of negative reviews out there despite the numerous reports and findings that stress the importance and value of “negative reviews” (e.g. Forrester’s “Myths and Truths about Customer Reviews” report, Dec. 2008). I set out on a cross-country tour, speaking with several of our clients and hearing their questions and insights about recent events and the state of customer reviews in general. I’d like to share some of those conversations (as well as some internal analysis) with you:

Having collected nearly 5 million customer reviews from more than 350 retailers, we have a pretty clear picture of the distribution of product ratings. We have found that 92% of all reviews are positive (with star ratings of 3 or higher). That leaves only 8% of reviews that are negative (ranking of 2 stars or lower). And since these 8% negative reviews are dispersed among many thousands of products, the negative impact to particular products is quite low. But there are, undoubtedly, products that have consistently negative reviews, and to be able to identify those “less than stellar” products early and confidently enables retailers (and even brands) to enhance their product offering by addressing these concerns in the product (or in the case of the retailer, pulling them from their shelves) so future shoppers don’t have a negative experience as well. More importantly, we know that some negative comments (including “cons”) add credibility to reviews and actually increase the chance of selling that product. It’s all about getting the “complete picture” of a product. Since consumers don’t believe there are “perfect” products, they just want to be informed about the cons (or shortcoming) of a product and decide for themselves whether they can live with them.

In short, if you’ve decided to give your customers the opportunity to communicate with you and other shoppers about your products, it’s important to allow them to voice all of their experiences (whether they be good or bad). Today’s consumers are extremely savvy and can identify fraudulent reviews and unethical business practices with ease – we encourage you to use reviews as an open and transparent communication channel with your customers, not a vehicle with which to dilute credible user insights by adding (or removing) content.