Another day, another technology company files for an IPO. After Jive and Angie’s List, customer reviews company Bazaarvoice has filed its S-1 with the SEC today. The company aims to raise as much as $86.25 million in its offering.
The Austin, TX- based Bazaarvoice, provides a SaaS that powers customer reviews platforms and other social commerce features on brand web sites like Best Buy, Blue Shield of California, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, P&G, Panasonic, and QVC. The company serves as a online reviews engine of sorts, aggregating customer reviews from the web, Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms. The company also syndicates retailer’s product reviews to shopping comparison engines. To date, Bazaarvoice has raised $20 million in funding from Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and others. → Read More
On the heels of Bazaarvoice raising an $8.8 million series B, competitor PowerReviews has just raised $15 million, adding to the $6.25 million they raised in late 2005. The round was led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners along with current investors Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards. Since its launch in April 2007, the number of reviews and products offered on Buzzilions.com has tripled. Today, the site offers more than 400,000 reviews on 125,000 products from over 1,000 ecommerce sites. PowerReviews says that the traffic driven through Buzillions also converts at nearly twice the rate of other shopping portals. In April we compared PowerReviews to Bazaarvoice and other competitors – PowerRevies main advantage is easy integration, and a free version of the product. User generated reviews help sales at ecommerce sites, but few startups have the technical and product resources to build this internally. PowerReviews, Bazaarvoice and others have stepped in to fill this need. Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia address different needs in the ecommerce space – helping these companies merchandise and recommend products to users based on behavior. → Read More
Bazaarvoice has closed $8.8 million in Series B funding in a round led by Battery Ventures with Austin Ventures and First Round Capital also participating. Battery Ventures General Partner Neeraj Agrawal has joined Bazaarvoice’s Board of Directors as part of the deal. Texas-based Bazaarvoice provides white label Amazon-like editorial recommendations for products to other companies. The pitch is that it is cheaper for companies to use Bazaarvoice’s setup than build their own client in-house. Other Bazaarvoice products include SyndicateVoice, a program where Bazaarvoice brokers relationships with leading shopping comparison engines — such as Smarter.com, Google, MSN and others syndicating clients’ reviews to these sites with links back to the retailers; and Ask & Answer, a white label community-driven Q&A for any product or service page. Current BazaarVoice clients include Wal-Mart, Dell, QVC, Sears and Macy’s. → Read More
Walmart finally added user comments and reviews to its website. Reuters covered the news today, which was picked up by major media. In those articles, Walmart CMO Cathy Halligan said reviews and comments were “the No. 1 customer-requested feature.” What this article didn’t mention is that Austin-based Bazaarvoice, a company I covered just over a year ago, is the technology and service behind Walmart’s new features. Like Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia, Bazaarvoice provides services to ecommerce sites that they may not be able to, or want to, build themselves. But where Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia provide recommendations, BazaarVoice offers user generated content features like comments, ratings and reviews. Getting such a large etailer is a major milestone for them. BazaarVoice isn’t the sexiest startup, but it has a real revenue model and is clearly seeing some success. It was funded by First Round Capital and Tom Ball at Austin Ventures. See our coverage of Buzzillions as well, a BazaarVoice competitor (albeit targeting smaller ecommerce sites). → Read More
Two startups have launched recently to assist web 1.0 content and commerce sites add much needed web 2.0 features – Aggregate Knowledge and BazaarVoice. The companies, both backed by Josh Kopelman’s First Round Capital, help companies add customer feedback features at a fraction of the price of developing them in-house. Menlo Park-based Aggregate Knowledge, led by CEO Paul Martino and VP Products Chris Law, launched officially today at the eTech conference. The company creates automated “behavior recommendations” for websites – things like “people who look at this also looked at” and “people who bought this also bought” features. See screen shot here for a visual. Integration is extremely simple. Aggregate Knowledge also creates white label “ajax homepages” for clients that help to promote this information. See this screenshot for an example. Texas-based BazaarVoice, which is a little further along than Aggregate Knowledge, provides Amazon-like editorial recommendations for products – things like customer reviews, etc. This is big business – BazaarVoice is able to provide their service at a fraction of the cost of in-house development, and even very large sites like CompUSA are starting to adopt their solution. Pricing starts at about $2,000 per month for smaller customers. In addition to Josh Kopelman, BazaarVoice has received funding from Tom Ball at Austin Ventures. → Read More
