When it comes to selling products on the Web, the more consumer reviews a product attracts, the more conversions and sales it sees as a result. This is why PowerReviews has built a social commerce network of more than 23 million reviews across 5,500 sites, including Staples.com, Gap.com, and ToysRUs.com. Today, PowerReviews is announcing the launch of two Facebook products that allow brands and retailers to leverage the social network as a platform for driving sales by making the process of online shopping and product discovery more social. → Read More
It’s a simple law of e-commerce: the more consumer reviews there are on a product, the more sales will result. ”As review numbers go up, conversions go up, and SEO traffic goes up,” says Cathy Halligan, SVP of sales and marketing for PowerReviews (and former CMO of Walmart.com). PowerReviews powers 23 million reviews across 5,500 sites including Staples.com, Gap.com, ToysRUs.com, and eFaucets, and is adding about 1 million reviews a month. But all of these reviews are siloed on each individual site. Today, PowerReviews is making it possible for brand sites to syndicate their reviews to e-commerce sites for the same products through a new product called BrandShare.
Consumers often go to brand sites to do research and leave reviews there, but most brand sites don’t actually sell their own products. PowerReviews already has a product catalog across its network of 35 million products. It will now take any reviews, whether they were written on its software, a competitor’s, or a home-grown review system and allow brands to syndicate them to existing PowerReviews customers. → Read More
PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $10 million in new funding led by Four Rivers Group, with Woodside Fund, Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital participating in the round. This investment brings PowerReview’s total venture funding to $37 million.
PowerReviews, which launched in 2007, provides retailers and brands with the ability to collect, organize and analyze comments and other user-generated content. The company also recently launched an integration with Facebook to bring the consumer’s social graph into the product review process. Customers include Staples, REI, ESPN, Callaway and Jockey. → Read More
PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $6.1 million in funding led by current investors Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million.
The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development. The company’s original products let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites. Last year, PowerReviews launched two more social technologies for retailers to integrate: BrandConnect and Social Megaphone. BrandConnect tracks what consumers are saying about a company and/or brand on the social web and Social Megaphone allows customers to post their reviews to Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Last fall the company also brought on a new CEO, Pehr Luedtke. → Read More
San Francisco based PowerReviews, which has raised over $21 million in venture financing, has let 30% of staff go, say multiple sources. Among those that left is VP Marketing Jay Shaffer.
The company let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. PowerReviews then aggregates reviews from their client retailers on their own customer-facing site called Buzzillions.
The company had at least 42 employees before the layoffs. We’ve contacted them for confirmation and have added them to the Layoff Tracker. → 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
Product Reviews are pure gold – people want to see what others say about a product before buying (Forrester Research says 71% of online shoppers seek out product reviews). If you control the reviews, you have a very qualified lead that you can then try to sell something to, or pass off to someone else for a fee. Today, product reviews are largely concentrated at big hubs like Amazon, CNET Reviews and Epinons (owned by eBay). But lots of startups are trying to innovate and get a piece of this market, too. We’ve written about Wize, which scrapes and analyzes reviews from sites around the web (mostly Amazon and epinions), turning mostly unstructured content into a 1-100 score. We’ve also looked at many others, including Retrevo, Viewscore, Shopwiki, Metacritic and Kulist in a comparison post. All have good features, but it’s hard to stand out from the pack and get enough traction to lead the space. PowerReviews is taking a different approach. There are many retailers that just don’t have the resources to build Amazon-like product review features into their websites. PowerReviews gives these merchants the ability to add reviews to their sites, and they don’t charge anything for it. Another startup we’ve covered, Bazaarvoice, also provides retailers with review software, although Bazaarvoice pricing starts at about $2,000 per month for smaller sites. Since PowerReviews is free, they have a big edge. To date, 120 merchants are using the PowerReviews software. 140,000 or so reviews have been created for 45,000 unique products. PowerReviews is willing to give away their software to merchants, but in return PowerReviews have the right to aggregate that review data and present it on their own consumer facing review site, Buzzillions. Here’s the brilliance of the PowerReviews model. They then turn around and sell traffic from Buzzillions right back to their merchant network, on a CPC or CPA basis. I don’t believe I’ve come across a startup before now that manages to use data, created at a partner site, to generate traffic that they then sell right back to the partner. PowerReviews isn’t stopping there. They are offering content sites a white label version of Buzzillions in exchange for a revenue share. Their hope is that these white label sites will generate enough traffic to supply PowerReviews with a business model. There is more to PowerReviews than an elegant business model. Their reviews are highly structured → Read More
