Citing research showing that customers are more likely to buy items online after they’ve read a few user reviews, both PowerReviews and BaazarVoice are expanding their services that collect and distribute user reviews.

PowerReviews user reviews show up on popular sites like ToysRUs.com

PowerReviews, which I’ve covered favorably in the past, is taking its user reviews service and making it available to smaller retailers. As before, the company makes a module that retailers can plug into their stores to collect reviews from buyers. The clever thing that PowerReviews does for retailers is collate all the reviews from across the Web together. So if Store A has only one review for a certain item but other retailers have additional reviews, Store A’s user review section for that item will show a reviews count that adds up all those other reviews. This makes the store look more active and also soothes buyers (providing the reviews are positive).

PowerReviews does not present competing retailers’ branding in its hosted service, but if you look on its aggregation site Buzzillions you can see where all the reviews are coming from.

The new Express program, which launches on November 26 at $80 a month (for the smallest retailer), grabs all the user reviews, including those from large outlets, and makes them appear to be local to the small retailer. Obviously, this can make a small retailer’s operation look more active than it truly is. The minor downside is that a small store with a quirky clientele might end up with mainstream reviews on it that don’t match its vibe, but that’s a pretty minor thing to worry about and is pretty much the biggest downside I can see for a small online store looking to increase its revenues.

BazaarVoice has its marquee clients, too, such as BestBuy.com

Meanwhile, BazaarVoice is launching a program, BrandVoice, in which manufacturers can collect user reviews on their sites and then syndicate those reviews out to their retailers. This service, like PowerReviews’, increases the number of user reviews that a potential customer sees on a retailer’s site.

The issue with both services, though, is trust. Since the user reviews a browser reads can now be coming from anywhere, like another store or a manufacturer’s site, how does a customer know that the reviews are honest?

PowerReviews has a “Verified Buyer” program that guarantees that reviews come from actual purchasers of a product. BazaarVoice lets reader flag fishy reviews, and employs a team of moderators and automated procedures to ensure that inflammatory of off-topic reviews don’t get posted for a product, but a fake review could, theoretically, be posted. BazaarVoice CMO Sam Decker told me that they could link the ability to write a review into a site’s login system, but that “70 percent of reviews come from people who’ve bought offline,” and neither he nor his company’s customers want to shut the door on valuable feedback from users who just don’t happen to buy the products on the Web.

The companies have different business models: PowerReviews’ Buzzillions site can be seen as competitive to the site where the reviews come from; BazaarVoice serves only manufacturers and retailers. But both companies are engaging in a very interesting new trend: they’re amplifying the consciousness of the consumer by spreading reviews around.

More: continued here

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting Web 2.0 Portals!

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Share This  |  Email It  |  Print It  |  Subscribe to It!
This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Web 2.0 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.