Choosing the best social commerce solution.

User-generated content provides the most measureable impact of almost any marketing initiative. So often, marketing is burdened with proving ROI, and usually it’s difficult to objectively prove solid results. Make sure your user-generated content solution offers metrics and analytics to prove results.

Bazaarvoice can demonstrate ROI on many levels, including:

• Web site conversion
• Average order value
• Email impact
• Natural search (SEO) traffic
• Reduction in product returns
• Customer satisfaction

Through our Community Managers dedicated to each account, we work with our clients to closely track the impact of customer content on their site and help them demonstrate impact to their management and peers. Check out some of our public case studies, and ask us to see more.

When customers provide their content and feedback, they want to feel like they are communicating directly with you, not hopping to another site or sending content to a third-party provider. You want your solution to look like it has always lived on your site.

Bazaarvoice offers highly customizable solutions that integrate seamlessly with your website branding and customer experience design. Our implementation team matches your existing fonts, color themes, buttons, icons, and layout. And we never include any Bazaarvoice links or graphics that could take away from your website branding.

Our dedicated implementation team provides full support, and our products integrate with leading eCommerce partners to integrate with any existing search, navigation, email, and web analytic solutions you use.

In general, you want to be able to gather all the content possible and not worry about changing your bandwidth specifications. Be sure to look at all aspects of hosting before you select your provider.

There are two ways to implement the Bazaarvoice solution: you host it or we host it. We recommend a Bazaarvoice-hosted integration that only requires a few lines of JavaScript on your product page. This allows fast implementation, gives you access to product enhancements every seven weeks with no IT support required from your team, and enables a superior search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. (Ask for our comprehensive “Boosting Natural Search Traffic using Ratings and Reviews” white paper). With a Bazaarvoice-hosted implementation, graphical changes can be made on the fly without getting “into the code.”

What’s the best case scenario? We think our clients’ feedback may answer this best:

“It is by far the easiest implementation we have experienced. The Bazaarvoice team offered exceptional support, and the product itself has far exceeded our expectations. It took us four hours to implement. It’s hard to imagine any IT team could take more than eight hours installing Bazaarvoice’s solution."
Jason Zimmerman, Lead Developer, PETCO

However, we also enable clients who want their hands on the code to integrate using their own HTML, JavaScript and even Flash. You can receive the data through an XML feed or Web Services API. Bazaarvoice still provides moderation, partnership integration, analytics, and other capabilities for a world class solution.

Other outsourced solutions offer just one way to implement and add more weight to your page with heavy code, which can harm your own SEO efforts and hurt the user experience for visitors.

Adding user-generated content to your site is an important marketing initiative that should happen quickly. You don’t want to wait to connect with your customers. You need a solution that is easy to implement from a company that helps you move quickly.

During the Bazaarvoice implementation process, which usually takes four to eight weeks, dedicated Project Managers and Implementation Engineers work with you every step of the way. As an application service provider (ASP), we handle the majority of the implementation work, and require our clients to allocate just 20 hours of IT time. We advise on everything from business best practices when implementing user-generated content, to graphic design that matches your existing site perfectly, to the most technical details of your project. With more than 150 implementations under our belt, we have established best practices that aid every client.

As stated by one of our clients who switched to Bazaarvoice:

“After signing on with a free solution, we rapidly realized the limitations of both integration and support. In the midst of experiencing serious integration difficulties, we revisited Bazaarvoice as an option. After having the experience, the old adage, ‘You get what you pay for’ still holds true. We were up and running after ten hours. Halfway through our implementation, our Director of Sales commented, ‘We have already received more than our annual service fees in customer service, and we aren't even live yet!’"
Andrew Cull, CEO and Founder, Remote Medical

You want moderation that combines automated and human review, done by literate, native speakers, completed in a timely fashion. It’s also important that guidelines are clear so all moderation is consistent, and you want to be able to customize moderation goals to fit your specific brand.

At Bazaarvoice, user-generated content is always fully moderated and posted within 72 hours, but often posted in less time. (By comparison, Amazon promises five to seven days.) Our content moderation services are performed by native-speaking, on-shore Content Analysts and Quality Assurance Analysts, all of whom are limited to four-hour shifts to ensure quality. All content goes through one level of automated moderation and two levels of human moderation.

Inappropriate content such as profanity is automatically flagged at submission time, so you never see this content published. (And, yes, you can customize the list of inappropriate words and profanity that you want to avoid.)

Anything that passes this initial phase of review enters the patent-pending Bazaarvoice Content Management System, where your own specific business rules and Bazaarvoice best practices are used to flag possible violations. The content is then read by a Content Analyst who decides whether to approve or reject it based on your business rules. Once approved, a Quality Assurance Analyst reviews the content again and applies reporting codes to the content for downstream analysis.

User reviews should not just be a “widget” on your site. Gathering customer content can be one of the most impactful marketing initiatives you employ, and you need a solution that helps you realize all the benefits of this content.

At Bazaarvoice, dedicated Community Managers work with each client to recommend the latest marketing best practices, hold regular status meetings, generate quarterly progress assessments, develop integration strategies, and share product expertise. They work specifically with each client to help generate more user-generated content, and they share best practices among all clients, while maintaining strict confidentiality. They are always looking for new ways to make their clients successful. This team receives detailed customer feedback and satisfaction scores from clients each quarter, which we are happy to share with you.

"My mantra is vendors should be 6-12 months ahead of us in strategy, and they should be a source of best practices to drive our business forward. Bazaarvoice gets 5-stars from us on both counts"
Matt Corey, Vice President of Marketing, Golfsmith

"Everyone that I've dealt with on your team has been totally top notch! It's clear that from the top down, delighting your customers is a top priority, if not THE priority. Your ‘new customer process’ has been a well-orchestrated experience."
Patrick Sullivan, Jr., President, Jigsaw Health

Your brand is unique to your organization. You want customers to connect and respond to your brand, not a “review company’s” brand.

Unlike other solutions that require you to share the copyright of the content, Bazaarvoice enables you to own all of your content exclusively. You will not see a Bazaarvoice logo or mention anywhere on your site. This is important for two reasons. First, it’s important for you to have the flexibility and control of your data in an evolving market. Second, we believe it’s critical that our incentives and focus are aligned with our clients' incentives and focus, not with a third-party B2C business.

You want to be able to see this data as often as you want. Make sure it’s easy to access it at any time.

Bazaarvoice can provide a regular feed of your data for purposes of integration or backup. We also give you access to your data via a Web Services API if you want to make calls to our servers directly, freeing up your IT and database resources. With Bazaarvoice, you are the exclusive owner of your data. We want to make it easy for our clients to get maximum ROI from this valuable content.

Analytics are critical to best using user-generated content. Once you start hearing from your customers, you should be able to prove marketing effectiveness and conversion, and even learn more about possible product and service improvements, suggested by your customers’ input.

The Bazaarvoice web-based analytics Workbench provides Executive Reporting; Rejected Reviews Reports; Reports by Item, Brand and Category; the popular All Reviews Report; Net Promoter Report; Questions Asked and Answered, and more. All reporting can be customized by several factors and exported to Excel for flexible manipulation and offline analysis. In addition, our web analytics partners include Omniture, Coremetrics, Visual Sciences and Web Trends, which means that your implementation can be tagged and measured with these solutions and that our word of mouth analytics data feed into segmented reporting with your tool of choice.

In addition to reporting, the Bazaarvoice Workbench includes key alerts and configurable alerts, allowing you and your colleagues to receive email alerts with executive summaries and brand-specific reports on what customers are saying about your products. These alerts are a great way to get other business functions involved and to evolve a customer-centric culture.

The Bazaarvoice mission is to deliver social commerce solutions that drive measurable results. We take analytics and ROI seriously. Be sure to compare screenshots and capabilities of reporting from Bazaarvoice with any alternative provider.

Your solution should not be a “box” that looks like any other solution. You should be able to create a solution that fits your site and your business needs.

Bazaarvoice is completely white label, integrating seamlessly onto your site, and can be implemented through hosted JavaScript, an XML feed, or a Web Services API. Learn more about implementation and integration.

With hosted implementation, you can control styling of the look and feel (font, colors, sizes, etc.) either through a request to Bazaarvoice (usually within a 24-hour turnaround) or through CSS that you control. We can change the layout of your submission form or the layout of your reviews display with no work from your IT team.

In addition, with the Bazaarvoice Workbench, you can control Badge Assignment (such as Expert or Staff badging), Review Removal, Review or Question Response, Internal User Administration and Reporting Alerts.

Workbench capabilities are consistently updated based on new reports and metrics that clients request.

User-generated content can dramatically increase natural search, but if your content is duplicated anywhere on the Internet, such as on a shopping portal, it can greatly diminish the natural SEO benefit.

Bazaarvoice employs a unique and proven “segmented content strategy” for SEO that maximizes the search traffic you can drive from both your user-generated content and from your product pages. In fact, in a recent study, no Bazaarvoice client saw more than a 3% overlap between the search terms used on their review content and those used on their product content. This means the reviews are driving new traffic above and beyond what our clients are already seeing on their main sites. Also, unlike other solutions that inject review content into the client’s main site – jeopardizing the SEO of the main site itself – Bazaarvoice reviews are hosted on a subdomain owned by the client, so our clients can often get the top three or four links on a single search results page.

Bazaarvoice never creates duplicate content. Reviews solutions that depend on the monetization of a portal rely heavily on duplicate content. This can cause a competing site to rank ahead of you in the search results, and can even cause your own pages to be ranked lower by search engines because they contain “duplicate content.” The Bazaarvoice method of implementing user-generated content follows the guidelines established and published by the major search engines, and it has been analyzed and approved by leading independent SEO experts. Your site will never be considered “duplicate” by any major search engine.

It can be expensive to have content on top shopping engines, usually above and beyond your investment in your user-generated content.

Bazaarvoice’s SyndicateVoice program is unique to the industry. We help our clients make the most of their user-generated content by syndicating their content to a large, diverse syndication network consisting of more than 20 partners, including Google Product Search, Smarter.com and MSN/Live.com, and we are constantly adding more. Our goal: to help clients get the most benefit from their user-generated content. Our business development team and data experts facilitate and maximize exposure on these networks.

On your own, you may choose to syndicate your content to as many portals and networks that will accept it; however, you will likely incur fees and you will need to establish connections yourself.

With Bazaarvoice, your content is syndicated on all the portals we work with, without any additional work on your part. Your content can be syndicated quickly and effortlessly to our more than 20 partners in our large, diverse syndication network.

No. Bazaarvoice syndicates content only to third parties that a client approves. Only excerpts of the syndicated content are allowed for display, and client attribution and links must always be displayed. These in-links drive better search engine results — and direct traffic — for you.

With any provider, you want to know that they are continuing to learn, listen to their customers, and expand on their offerings to exceed customer expectations.

The Bazaarvoice business model is focused entirely on the needs of clients. Without the distraction of a B2C business, we focus all research, development and service directly toward our clients. We have a 100% customer-focused roadmap, and we regularly get feedback from client representatives on new features we are envisioning.

New product enhancements are delivered every seven weeks. Almost all are free and evergreen, which is part of being on our ASP platform. The benefit of working with Bazaarvoice is that your user-generated content platform will always be improved by the thought leadership within our company and fueled by ideas from more than 160 clients from multiple industries. With every release, we get feedback from clients on new ideas. These ideas are consistently incorporated into our product for your benefit.

Our vision has not only been proven with best-in-class features on our Ratings & Reviews platform, but also with other social commerce features and programs, such as SyndicateVoice and Ask & Answer. Partnering with Bazaarvoice means your social commerce strategy will always evolve, keeping you ahead of your competition.

Being online means you are worldwide from the beginning. Having a solution that will work in your international markets means that new markets can go live more quickly.

The Bazaarvoice platform is fully internationalized in more than14 languages, including double byte character sets. We already have proof of international deployment and impact with clients such as Dell, HP, Figleaves and others.

You want to make sure that you’re not working with a fly-by-night company that might not be there in 10 years to support your solution. In the web space, most companies are new, so you want to understand how they generate revenue to determine if the business is sustainable in the long term.

Bazaarvoice announced profitability in May. Our business model has already been validated by more than 160 paying clients, including some of the world’s largest brands. We have repeatedly shown that the presence of product reviews on an eCommerce site drives conversion (i.e., sales), customer loyalty (i.e., repeat buying), and a corresponding decrease in returns (as consumers are setting each other’s expectations in an honest way).

In September 2007, Bazaarvoice raised $8.8 million in a second round of funding to expand capabilities, and in January 2008, we secured funding from European Founders fund specifically to support our expansion into the UK and Europe. We have no doubt that our customers can depend on us to deliver quality services and new products for many years to come.

In short, at Bazaarvoice, we make money as long as our solutions create proven benefit to our clients. We work every day to ensure this happens, and we constantly prove it to our clients.