A picture is worth a thousand words

I just got back from Southern California visiting family for Thanksgiving. And like millions of others, I went to the local mall on Friday and shopped the sales. Besides being a feeding frenzy, I was most amazed at the sheer volume and unparalleled selection of goods for sale. And, of course, I am again faced with my annual dilemma – what to tell my family I want for Christmas.

Don’t know what you really want this holiday season either? Well, maybe we can help, At PowerReviews, we’ve taken “finding the right product” to the next level this holiday season on our shopping portal Buzzillions.com with the launch of our Visual DNA Wishlist. All you have to do is choose some images that have meaning to you plus answer a few simple questions like age and location. It’s really mind-blowing – a fun way to discover products and put together your Holiday wish list.

Give it a try and make sure to tell me what you think!

Using the holidays to your personal business advantage

Now before you get all worked up on this title, let me explain. Several years ago during a family Thanksgiving I learned an incredibly important lesson – one that I have repeated at every holiday season. I used my family as a focus group.

It didn’t start out that way, of course. It actually spawned from the familial love that comes when your distant cousins and out of town relatives are dying to get caught up with what all that you have been up to since the last time you met. In my case, I had just started at Wine.com and my family was not just excited for me but rather intrigued as well given their love of wine. So after a quick explanation of how we were changing the site and the company to be more of a lifestyle experience rather than just a bottle shop, I decided it was easier just to show them.

After driving through the site a few pages, the more impatient ones wanted to get straight to the point – did we carry their favorite wine? So rather than play tour guide, I gave them full control of the mouse and put them in the driver’s seat – and that’s when the magic happened. I was able to immediately see the minor flaws in our navigation, search, basic UI and such as useless clicks were happening at a rapid rate. I spent the next few hours then sitting with a few members of my family whom I thought would be part of our ideal demographic and took copious notes.

These notes became part of the framework for the redesign efforts of the Wine.com site which is still in use today.

So here is my holiday pearl of wisdom to share with you all. After all the giving of thanks are done, ask for a simple favor. Capitalize on the opportunity at hand and ask your clan of all ages that has gathered from all over to take a drive through your respective websites and just watch and learn. I am sure that if you do, you will be giving thanks over the next few months as you put your findings to work!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

The best birthday gift – discovering the Social Researcher!

This week I celebrated my birthday – and thanks to all of you for the great emails, cards and writings on my wall in Facebook – and my special day was made even sweeter by the incredible interest in and coverage of our Social Shopping Study which surpassed even my high expectations for this effort. It started as a simple project with my dear friend Lauren Freedman of the e-Tailing Group; to determine the current level of interest and commitment that shoppers have in using reviews in their online purchasing decisions given the incredible growth in review functionality and availability in retails sites today. Well that project quickly evolved into something much greater once we got some initial results back.

You see, we uncovered a new breed of online shopper, the “Social Researcher,” who places increased significant emphasis on peer feedback in product reviews when making purchasing decisions. These folks, who represented 65% of the survey respondents, actually seek out and read customer reviews prior to making online purchase decisions. And in fact, as a group, their interest in and use of reviews across all behavioral aspects was at a rate 20% higher than the average online shoppers.

And for the icing on my birthday cake, when presented with Social Navigation functionality – the ability to narrow product selections based on reviews from like-minded people with similar interests – an amazing 82% of respondents found reading reviews better than researching a product in-store with a knowledgeable sales associate. These findings continue to validate of our tag-based customer review solution, our vision for the future of online shopping as well as the premise for why and how we created our shopping portal Buzzillions.com!

To see more of the survey findings please see http://www.powerreviews.com/social-shopping/news/press_breed_11122007.html

Character Building

One of the things we hear over and over from our clients is how expressive our reviews are given our tag-based structure that allows reviewers to quickly identify those product benefits and characteristics most important to them, and of course, relevant to the reader! And not ones to sit on our laurels, we recently launched two improvements to the review submission process that have both achieved early successes.

They talked, we listened. Several of our clients, both pure-play and multi-channel retailers, told us they would love to further engage their customers in the review process by allowing them to specifically share comments about the service these respective retailers provide. So we launched our Service Comments functionality, where retailers can choose to add this option to their review process submission using the admin tool – once again empowering our retail clients to leverage our review solution and build reviews with even more character to meet the specific needs of their shoppers.

The second improvement was actual just a little change to the review submission UI, but with big results. With minor changes to the text prompt for the Comments section, we saw a 17% increase in the number of characters being submitted across all our client partners. After some focused initial testing efforts, we launched the new UI and then compared the character length of Customer Comments on 10,000 reviews before the change to 10,000 after then change. A real character builder, indeed!

eTail Mid-Market 2007 – San Jose

It was with great honor that I served as the opening keynote speaker for the recent eTail Mid-Market event in San Jose (October 2007) and continuing on as Chairman for that entire first day. And besides the spotlight, which admittedly brings out the best in me, the real benefit from serving as chairman is that you get to be right in the thick of things and fully engaged in all of the conversations. And what conversations they were!

There was an enormous amount great content shared at the conference and to include it all here would be nearly impossible. So here are some event highlights…

Without question, my interview with Bill Bass was a conference highlight for me. Having known Bill for many years going back to his days at Land’s End when I was at Wine.com, it was a golden opportunity for me to get caught up with his latest venture which is about to celebrate its first anniversary – Fair Indigo. And as the title might slyly suggest, at the core of this clothing enterprise is the practice of fair wages for all workers. Not only did I admire him for not only trying but actually making a real difference in the practice of fair wages for apparel workers, but get this, the company launched as a full multi-channel player with both an online and offline presence plus catalog! And I am not exaggerating here when I say that the audience was mesmerized by all that Bill Bass, CEO Fair Indigo had to say. For more information about this great company and its progressive efforts in fair trade check out this article that ran in Time Magazine earlier this year.

Add to that the incredible discussions centering on today’s hottest topics and the first day was a real standout. All the panelists were exceptional with a few real standouts in my mind who really understand their business and are making some amazing strides in the online shopping experience including Albert DiPadova from Due Maternity who amazed us with his innovate Widgets, Bill Pryor of Shoebuy whose ability to identify and move the levers to grow his business was very impressive, Rob Giglio from Art.com who dazzled us with their successful strategy of regulated and positive growth and finally Carl Prindle of Furniture.com who shared with us his unique perspective and insights of having worked at Furniture.com way back when before the bubble burst and then again now with an entire new set of rules to play by in the online world.

There is so much more I could share with you all about this great event where being the little guy is a good thing, but let me just say this in closing. All of us could learn from these incredibly nimble, eager and passionate companies that embrace the spirit of learning and doing and implementing and testing and trying and… not being mired down in the difficulties which often comes with larger sized companies. Summing it up best – just do it!

Closing note of thanks to our friends at Omniture

“One of the best business dinners I have ever attended” is how one of the guests cooed about the Omniture/PowerReviews co-hosted dinner on the eve of the main event. It was the perfect mix of friends, clients and prospects paired with food and wine that was extraordinaire. And while some folks insisted in chatting about business before and after the event, the “no business at the dinner table” rule my mother taught me as a child was fully enforced! Many thanks to my pals at Omniture for helping us create a truly spectacular evening and a perfect way to “launch” the event!

Proud as a Peacock

As my best friend from grade school used to say “Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner!” It is with much pride that our online shopping portal Buzzillions.com was recently recognized for Outstanding Achievement in Website Development by the Interactive Media Awards(TM) (IMA). The honor was based on design, usability, and innovation in technical features with specific excellence in Retail—quite a heavy tribute indeed!
I would like to publicly give props to Jim (Jimbo) Morris, VP and GM of Buzzillions.com, for the exceptional work he and his team have done. This is the third IMA win for Buzzillions.com in 2007 as this past May, the site was awarded Best in Class honors in both the Consumer Goods and Ratings/Reviews categories in May 2007.

If you have not already checkout our new shopping portal with its innovative way of helping people find products based on recommendations from people just like them who have the same interests and intended product uses, then do it now. At last count we have more than 675,000 reviews on more than 175,000 different products and are adding over 1,000 new products to the site every day from our over 130 client partner sites such as REI, Staples, ToysRUs, Walgreens, Uncommon Goods and over 130 more. Plus you will see products from websites that have their own in-house review systems such as B&H Photo as well as from sites like Overstock.com that use other providers of review systems. We don’t discriminate—we like all product reviews!

Thanks for letting me boast about Buzzillions.com and the enormous success it has achieved in just 6 months since launched and make sure to check out the site when you start your holiday shopping!

Happy Halloween – Very Scary Unsupported Statements – BOO!

Happy Halloween!

You think this is scary? Well wait until you read this

The latest in a series of unsupported boasts by the “other player” in this market claims (without any quantifiable or auditable support documentation) that their new ask and answer product yet again drives a huge increase in sales – “products with 2 or more answers convert at 22% higher sales”…

This “bear” of a fact is hard for me to swallow without any proven data being offered up in support since any number of issues could be the real drive for the increase:

• the company had a poor history of answering customer service product inquiries, which means that any response at all that would provide relevant information to help in the buying decision making process would lead to increased sales
• the product was getting additional reviews with the information in the review helping drive the sale – not the “answer”
• there were seasonality issues or marketing promotions also at play

Look, I am all about helping grow the awareness of the incredible benefits user generated content brings to the online shopping experience. I do ask that all of us players in this group take the more responsible route like we did when we published the findings from the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s study on the impact from adding customer reviews on NetShops websites. Specifically, the 26% increase in sales on products with reviews was after we removed all marketing and seasonality effects. I am sure that many would have been tempted publishing the 36% before those items were excluded – but that is not how “Pooh” rolls.

Again, Happy and Safe Halloween to you all.