Endeca Selects Bazaarvoice for Social Navigation Capabilities within New Endeca Discovery Suite

Bazaarvoice offers five customer review input options, including TagShare™ pros and cons, for out-of-the-box integration between the Endeca Information Access Platform and Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews

AUSTIN, TX AND SHOP.ORG LAS VEGAS– September 17, 2007 –Bazaarvoice, Inc. (www.Bazaarvoice.com), the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, and Endeca Technologies, Inc. (http://Endeca.com), an enterprise information access software company, today announced out-of-the-box integration between the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP) and Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews. Online retailers who power their search, Guided Navigation®, and dynamic merchandising capabilities with the Endeca IAP, and use Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews to generate product reviews, can take advantage of the new integration through the Endeca Discovery Suite Social Navigation module. Bazaarvoice enables social navigation with five options to collect customer feedback, including 5-star product dimensions and shopper tag-based pros and cons.

The combination of Endeca and Bazaarvoice takes advantage of customer-generated product reviews and shopper profiles to help people browse and find desirable products using a combination of product characteristics and the preferences of similar buyers. As a result, site owners can create an entirely new kind of shopping experience that will boost conversion rates, increase customer satisfaction, and provide competitive differentiation over sites that simply offer product-centric search and navigation.

“Deeper integration of Bazaarvoice’s flexible, modular, and tag-based ratings and reviews solution with Endeca’s Social Navigation capabilities is a key innovation for our clients,” said Brett Hurt, CEO of Bazaarvoice. “Shoppers want the ability to leverage rich customer input from their peers to not only learn about products, but also to explore and discover products based on this same valuable criteria. Joint clients like PETCO have already benefited from our integration with Endeca by driving a 49-percent higher conversion rate and 63-percent higher average order value (AOV) for customers who browse via their ‘Top Rated Products’, and 41-percent higher AOV for customers who utilize the ‘Sort By Rating’ option within search results.”

Social navigation is an emerging capability that leverages customer-generated content – reviews, opinions, recommendations, and posts – to create new ways to explore, analyze and understand information. Bazaarvoice’s integration with Endeca fuels new navigation categories and merchandising information, and enhances site search effectiveness through new sorting and filtering options. Bazaarvoice’s integration with Endeca is quick and effective, and incorporates multiple aspects of a shopper’s opinion on products, including:

• Overall Product Rating: 1-5 star rating describing the customer’s overall experience with a product, which can be used to build merchandised product categories (i.e. Top Rated Products) and to enhance product filtering capabilities (i.e. Sort by Rating).
• Product Reviews: allows customers to share their open-ended experiences with a product, and can be included as searchable content via Endeca.
• TagShare™: allows reviewers to quickly select tag-based pros and cons about their product experiences, and to create new open-ended descriptors that reflect an authentic summary of their opinions. Tags are shared across a network of clients to reflect the most popular tags to choose from, and reviewers are able to quickly auto-populate suggestions when adding their own tags. 
• Slider Ratings: allows reviewers to rate a product in a more subjective way than a 5-star scale. Sliders help express a customer’s experience by selecting a tendency toward one descriptor or another, such as “modern” versus “classic”, or “fitted” versus “flowing”.
• Product Dimensions: allows reviewers to provide 1-5 star rating on key product attributes such as value, power, and durability.

Endeca’s new Social Navigation module, the first of its kind in the market, is one of the first in a series of modules available through the Endeca Discovery Suite. These new modular capabilities will give both new and existing Endeca and Bazaarvoice customers the ability to take advantage of the advances immediately.

“Social shopping is the future of online retail, and we are pleased to partner with Bazaarvoice, an established market leader in social commerce solutions,” said Matt Eichner, Vice President of Strategic Development and Marketing at Endeca. “Our integration with Bazaarvoice provides new ways to explore Web sites – from finding information and products based on the opinions of others to navigating products based on a combination of product attributes and related, user-generated content. The result is an entirely new kind of shopping experience for consumers and higher overall sales for retailers.”

The Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews integration with the Endeca IAP is streamlined and includes capabilities such as:

• Tag extraction capabilities to pull and reveal concepts, common themes, and other key entities from text-based reviews for use in site navigation, search relevancy, and SEO optimization.
• Profile-based navigation to help people find information and products by others with similar tastes, desires, and characteristics.
• Content aggregation abilities, combined with Endeca’s patented search and Guided Navigation experience, to offer shoppers new ways to explore all reviews and other user-generated content spread across a site, or collection of sites, by the criteria most relevant to their session.
• Tag-based visualization and navigation to complement static and dynamic site navigation, giving people more ways to explore and find desirable content and products.
• Reference applications to speed development and ensure best practices for common use cases.
• Meta-relational capabilities to link different content types by common concepts, allowing people to dynamically summarize the user-generated content associated to any set of products.

About Endeca
Endeca is a next-generation information access company, uniting the ease of search with the analytical power of business intelligence. Combining patented intellectual property, breakthrough science and a deep focus on user experience, the Endeca Information Access Platform helps people find, analyze and understand information in ways never before possible. Leading global organizations like ABN AMRO, Bank of America, Boeing, Cox Newspapers, Dice, The (US) Defense Intelligence Agency, The Home Depot, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, The Library of Congress, Nike, and Walmart.com rely on Endeca to power business-critical applications that increase revenue, reduce costs and streamline operations.

Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA, Endeca is a private company with worldwide operations. For more information: www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.

About Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoice offers outsourced technology, services, analytics, and expertise to help companies enhance the online shopping experience with social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ and Ask & Answer™ deliver immediate success by minimizing implementation risk and maximizing the strategic impact of user-generated review content through complete customization, deep integration, community management, advanced analytics, search engine optimization, and syndication across the Web and to offline channels.

Bazaarvoice was named a Red Herring Top 100 company in 2006 and received the 2006 ClickZ Marketing Innovation of the Year award. Bazaarvoice currently serves over 120 eCommerce leaders including Bass Pro Shops, Dell, Macy’s, Overstock.com, PETCO, QVC, Sears, and ZipRealty. The company has headquarters in Austin, TX and offices in London, UK. For more information, please visit the company’s Web site at www.bazaarvoice.com or email .

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