Bazaarvoice Offers Holiday Merchandising Tips for Retailers

Austin, TX – December 5, 2006 –This holiday season, consumers are increasingly seeking advice from others before making their biggest purchases of the year. Bazaarvoice, an innovator in helping brands use online word of mouth to build their businesses, served more than 19 million reviews across clients such as Bass Pro Shops, CompUSA, PETCO, and Macy's on Cyber Monday (November 27) this year. Bazaarvoice offers several tips to help retailers use consumer-generated content to pick and promote the right products in December and into the New Year.

“The idea behind customer-created marketing and merchandising is to market with your customers instead of to them,” said Sam Decker, vice president of marketing and products for Bazaarvoice. “Customer ratings and reviews offer holiday shoppers the authenticity, credibility, and relevance they need to move them to purchase in a virtual sea of product choices. Promoting top-rated products with real review content is a fast, easy route to more holiday sales.”

Bazaarvoice offers the following five tips for turning ratings and reviews into a breakthrough merchandising strategy:

•Turn to Ratings and Reviews to Determine What Is Hot (And Not): You don't have to trust your gut when picking out the products that you think will fly off the shelves. Instead, you can easily identify a hot product by looking at the rating velocity and the average rating. Products that score high on both are the products that get a lot of positive word-of-mouth. For example PETCO customers have written hundreds of reviews on Greenies, a $.99 dog treat! The products customers are passionate about are the ones that should be prominently merchandised.

•Bring the Customer Voice Into the Holiday Gift Guide: Every holiday, many retailers feature gift guides - usually from merchandise selected for mysterious reasons to the customer. A gift guide featuring top-rated products gives customers a reason to click down the virtual aisles of a gift guide.

•Transform Your Customers Into Copywriters: Who's writing your product copy this holiday season? If you have the voice of your customer, that's a digital marketing asset that should be featured this holiday season. Rather than writing their own product copy, PETCO featured product review text from its customer in an email campaign and saw a 500% increase in click-through rates.

•Dress Up Your Product Descriptions With Star Ratings: Why should customers accessorize a product, up-sell to the next level, or buy what you feature in an email? Perhaps because it's a top-rated product. A product that is merchandised without its rating icons is practically naked to a customer this holiday season. Dress your product merchandising up with a rating icon wherever you feature a product and a price, and make it clear that the rating icon is the assessment of your customer, not your merchandising team.

•Use Ratings and Reviews in SEM Campaigns - and in Retail Stores, Circulars, and Catalogs: Top-rated products and consumer-generated review content make a valuable addition to SEM campaigns, advertising efforts, and the in-store experience. Consider using customer-created content and top-rated products in your search engine marketing (SEM) programs. You can also feature "Top X Products" advertisements in your search engine ads, pointing to a landing page featuring the authenticity and credibility of customer-created content. Or take a tip from leading fair trade apparel retailer Fair Indigo, which has installed in-store kiosks to allow shoppers to access ratings and reviews directly from the store floor.

For more information on consumer-generated ratings and reviews, please visit http://bazaarvoice.com/whitepaper.html and download Bazaarvoice's latest whitepaper entitled "Ratings, Reviews and ROI."