Dream on!
One day you wake up and you have a vision… or invited to share in one. And if you are an ecommerce nut like us here at PowerReviews then that vision is all about e-commerce. And so it was born, the desire to bring a new and improved way to shop online where finding the right product was a certainty and not a “fingers-crossed, gee I hope it looks like the picture and is as soft as it looks, but will it shrink or run a bit small” roll of the dice crap shoot.
And at the heart of that dream is a relevancy-based review solution that empowers shoppers with meaningful, identifiable, useful information and real world examples of how a product really works, so they know there will be no regrets the moment they click that add-to-cart button. The product they bought is exactly what they were looking for with no surprises in the weeks ahead when their packages arrive. And we all know that meeting expectations makes for a happy customer shopping experience and happy customers always come back… and back… and back…
Yup, it’s a pretty big dream, but then again, so are the dreamers. And like all great dot.com companies in their earliest days, our passion for this shared vision has brought together an impressive group of believers with credentials to match. And after talking about our dream for more than a year now, we have more than 150 clients who share and believe in this vision of ours.
Over the next few weeks I will be showcasing some of these retail clients who have truly adopted this vision and have brilliantly executed our shared dream
I hope you’ll stick around as this is going to be fun!
I’m an even bigger believer of the potential of Facebook!
Guess what? I am on vacation! But as all of us know, technology has made it nearly impossible to truly remove oneself from the long tentacles of technology no matter how remote you are.
With that said, I am writing to you from a little Wi-Fi café in Sousa – a very small and wonderful coastal city in the Dominican Reublic – trying to keep caught up with work issues as the year end comes to a close. And while sitting here trying to mind my own business, I just happen to look up in time to see the only other person at the café launch Facebook. And as someone who recently joined Facebook I am way too familiar with their screens, this guy just agreed to become someone’s freind – really making the viral reach of Facebook unlimited and borderless.
Enough said. I am really a true believer now – so please invite me to be your Facebook friend!
Oh one more thing, I promise to put up a Sousa picture as soon as I get back!
Hasta Tarde!
Plan on it!
I know that many of you out there are already knee deep in holiday traffic and hopefully all your hard work and preparations for these few key weeks is paying off. In that regard, I’d like to share with you what our friends at Lillian Vernon have been up to and some of the key preparations they undertook for this 2007 Holiday Season.
Lillian Vernon, one of our more recent clients, has already seen the benefits of our unique relevancy based review system permeate well beyond the product detail page and conversion funnel. They are harnessing the full power of reviews as a source of solid customer feedback for the development and improvement of products and services, too!
If you have not already done so, see what Lillian Vernon’s EVP of Operations Chris Anderson has to say about the role of reviews in their holiday plans this year.
Q: What kind of preparation is involved for your holiday shipping period, and when do you start?
A: We are continually working to improve our operations, so preparation for the holiday is an ongoing endeavor. As soon as Lillian Vernon’s peak holiday season is complete, we begin to focus on the process and how we can execute it better next year. Early in the year, we work on more significant process improvements or changes. As we get closer to the beginning of our peak season, we build our inventory, training, and staffing plans. We also work with the merchants to insure alignment between our assortment strategy and process capabilities.
Cyber Monday Celebration
As the numbers continue to pour in from all authoritative sources for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday activity, we here at PowerReviews are still celebrating the outstanding traffic days that we experienced on our shopping portal, Buzzillions.com.
We saw more than a 50% increase in traffic during the entire 4-day stretch, clearly signaling that our shopping portal has been adopted by today’s online shoppers and has real strong retail legs! In fact, I am happy to share with all of you that Buzzillions is now a 5-star (or b-bar) Commission Junction publisher – their highest level! Our retail clients/partners are thrilled with the traffic we have been sending them which has been converting on average well above 5% with some partners seeing more than 10% rates.
I thought that with all our clients being retail focused, this would be a quiet holiday time for us – well I thought wrong. We have been busy signing dozens of new clients these past few weeks and have more than 15 new clients scheduled to launch in the first two weeks of December alone!
Well, I better get back to work because we are busier than ever!
