May 29th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Nearly every month we come out with new features on our Ratings and Review Platform. Among several new features, I will highlight these two:
Client Response System
When customers write a review, the client response system enables clients to post a response. So, for example, if a customer who writes a review posts a question or something that needs more clarity the client can respond directly.
Pros and Cons
As optional fields clients can enable customers to write product pros and cons. These words serve as keywords or tags on a review, and also allow readers to quickly view the reasons a reviewer likes or dislikes a product. Eventually, these pros and cons can be grouped and feed search and navigation paths, plus search engine optimization through Bazaarvoice Review Landing Pages.
May 29th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
"Welcome to the age of [crowdsourcing]. Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley's SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains".
- from Wired Magazine, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", pages 177-183, June 2006
As I was reading my latest Wired magazine, I was really struck by this article. The Internet has revolutionized business in so many ways, but "crowdsourcing" may be the most revolutionary application to date. Think of Wikipedia, Linux, eBay, YouTube, Google's ads, and the many other businesses that have been created by connecting the power of the crowd via the Internet.
So how does crowdsourcing apply to eCommerce? Well, it is leading to the creation of entirely new businesses. For example, look at Threadless.com. It is on track to earn more than $20 million in revenue this year by crowdsourcing designs for t-shirts. They sell one-of-a-kind shirts that are vetted by the crowd as the best. You can see something similar happening on Zazzle, which has a more professional feel (not as much of a MySpace community feel as Threadless.com). In addition to t-shirts, Zazzle lets you apply the crowdsourced designs on posters, mugs, postage, and cards. Although you could dismiss these businesses as too niche or fringe to matter, it would be a mistake to do so. They are revolutionizing merchandising by crowdsourcing.
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May 22nd, 2006 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
An update from the Client Services team is long overdue . . . My silence is due in part to how busy our team has been in recent weeks managing the deployment of ratings & reviews for several new clients. The second reason for my delay in posting is that I married my best friend and partner of almost 6 years, Andrea, on May 12th, and I spent last week in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina relaxing with her before returning to work. The team has welcomed me back with open arms, but they can't resist poking fun at the fact that I have a new nervous habit – fidgeting with my wedding band!
Starting on April 18th, we kicked off a series of 5 new client launches with the deployment of our solution on Shoes.com, our first true apparel client. From beginning to end, the Shoes.com team worked hard to get our solution out to their customers, and they are now running a $250 gift certificate promotion to encourage review submissions. We expect great things from the Shoes.com reviewer community, as their response to the promotion has already exceeded expectations.
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May 22nd, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Red Herring today announced the Red Herring 100 North America, a selection of 100 privately held companies in North America that play a leading role in innovating the business of technology. Bazaarvoice was honored to be selected for this list.
We are one of two (Pluck is the other) companies from TX on the list, and one of 15 Internet Services companies selected. And both companies are funded from Austin Ventures. Here ist he full list:
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May 19th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
A couple weeks ago I blogged about a finding from an eVoc Insights study, where 63% of online shoppers are more likely to buy from sites with ratings and reviews.
There is another interesting finding in this study…
25% of online shoppers ACTIVELY (over 76% of the time they shop) seek out product reviews before they make a purchase.
73% of shoppers seek out ratings and reviews 25% or more. And so on. See the graph below.
I did some math with the numbers shown in the graph above. If you take the % of people from each piece of the pie X the average % of the time they seek out reviews, it concludes that online shoppers will seek out reviews for 48% of their purchases.
What does this mean?
First, and most alarming, it means that if you don't have reviews, 48% of your visitors have to leave your site before making a purchase because they are seeking reviews before purchase.
One of the places they're going to get reviews is your competitor, Amazon. Notice on the graph that 25% of those who seek out reviews go to Amazon to check them. If you are a retailer (relevant to Amazon's categories who does not have reviews, you are giving up 12% of your highly considered shoppers to Amazon (25% X 48% = 12%).
According to a shop.org study, 56% of consumers still start their shopping on a retailer site. So it's not too late to keep them there!
