A Gracious Good-bye
I can still remember the first time I met Andy Chen – and it feels like it was just yesterday! Once I got used to Andy’s spunkiness and scrappiness of PowerReviews’ then marketing efforts, I became a huge fan and supporter, and going forward spent much of my time making sure Andy got the introductions to whomever he wanted – I wasn’t even a customer yet!
In fact, I didn’t become a customer for nearly a year later. And it was during the contract signing that I told Andy – “Do you know what you have here? This has the potential to be HUGE, way beyond reviews; this is about fundamentally changing the way people shop online.” I believed it 100% then and I believe it 125% now.
Now, after 18 months as the VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing at PowerReviews, I feel the foundation has been laid, and the fun part of my job is done. During this period, PowerReviews has become one of the industry’s most recognized and respected ecommerce companies. It is with much excitement, and an enormous sense of pride, that I begin seeking out my next big challenge. As of today, I will no longer be managing the day-to-day sales and marketing efforts for PowerReviews. I will, however, stay connected and involved in the company in an advisory capacity until year end.
In the meantime, I encourage you to stay tuned for exciting new developments from both PowerReviews and Buzzillions.
All my best,
Jay Shaffer
The Numbers Are In – What a Quarter!
Amidst all this uncertainty in the news these days, there is only one thing we here at PowerReviews know for sure – merchants love our review solution and are adopting it in record numbers.
As of this week (October 15) our 2008 Total Sales YTD (year-to-date) have surpassed total sales for all of 2007. With three consecutive quarters of record growth, sales in Q3 ‘08 were the highest quarterly total this year and in our company’s history.
Besides growing sales we have been growing and diversifying where these sales come from. We formally established our U.K. presence this last quarter with a localized sales, account management and review moderation team. We have more than a dozen sites launched in the UK already, with more to come before the end of the year.
Along with our enterprise efforts, we soft-launched PowerReviews Express, our on-demand solution for today’s smaller online merchants. We have more than 180 additional clients participating in this beta program with more signing up every day!
But the good news doesn’t stop there. Our reviews and recommendations site, Buzzillions.com had equal success adding more than 1 million reviews on more than 100,000 new unique products in the just the past 3-months.
So a BIG KUDDOS to everyone at PowerReviews for this incredible achievement and a special shout-out to our sales and Buzzillions teams for managing this continued growth in business.
A Darwinian Christmas?
Three mornings ago I stopped at the local Safeway (supermarket) on my way to work and saw the oddest thing. Several people were in the check-out lines, each carrying dozens of packages of Mother’s Cookies. Apparently, the Mother’s Cookies guy was stocking the shelves for possibly the very last time – he had told everyone within earshot that Mother’s was closing their doors after 92 years in business.
Besides being an Oakland, CA based company and just across the bay from PowerReviews, I hold a special fondness for these folks as my earliest childhood memories are of eating those small pink and white glazed animal shaped cookies – a childhood classic. Seeing that rumor become reality as the official news of their demise published in today’s newspaper, filled me with a sense of sadness as well as acceptance and resolve that this holiday is going to be a survival of the fittest for sure!
So how do online merchants survive this holiday season? Well, having been a former merchant myself for the past many years, I’d like to offer a few suggestions that go beyond just providing overall great service:
- Stick to what you do best and do it even better, focusing on those products and services that are essential to your bottom line
- Offer shoppers the simplest, easiest and yet most comprehensive shopping experience possible
- Give access to everything they need to easily find and then decide on those products right for everyone on their shopping list
It is this last one where we here at PowerReviews can help – yes, there is still time, but not much! If you have reviews, then leverage them throughout your shopping experience. Free them from the product page and let their insights help and guide the rest of your shoppers. And if you don’t have reviews yet, get them. Our pricing model, which is pay-per-performance base and risk-free for the merchant, combined with the easiest review solution to implement today, makes including reviews in your shopping experience a great way to become one of the “fittest” merchants this holiday season.
The Combo Plate
Product reviews are great. Product recommendations are great too. Put them together and you have synergy!
Working with our friends at MyBuys, one of the leading providers of product recommendations for online merchants, we combined our technologies for our shared client Essential Apparel to achieve very impressive results!
By integrating PowerReviews customer ratings and reviews with MyBuys product recommendations, Essential Apparel, which offers more than 20,000 SKUs to their wide customer base, achieved more than 9% conversion in their targeted email alerts.
You can read the entire announcement here.
Congratulations to Essential Apparel for their progressive and forward thinking approach to making highly relevant product recommendations to their customers!
Customer Spotlight: Diapers.com
Parents for Change…
Humor can be an enormously powerful tool in your communication efforts. When used effectively it can help your marketing message become a real standout, making such a positive impression that your shoppers just can’t refuse the offer.
And when it comes to finding creative ways to acquire new customers, our friends at Diapers.com have made tongue-in-cheek humor on a timely topic into an art form! Capitalizing on this election cycle with its “Time for Change” themes, Diapers crafted a highly entertaining 1-minute video that puts a smile on your face, pokes fun at the “dirty” job of selling diapers and definitely communicates a fun brand image.
The message is fresh and the video, which is accessible by a banner on their homepage, closes with a coupon good on your first order. Considering that much of their core product offering is a highly commoditized product, this is a great way to grab the attention of today’s online shopper and acquire a new online customer.
So hats off to Josh Himwich, their Director of Content Solutions, and the entire team at Diapers.com who never cease to impress and delight. Enjoy the show: “Time for Change”
Wingman Extraordinaire: Final Notes on the Shop.org Summit
One of the best things about the recent Shop.org even in Las Vegas was having my dear friend Alison Jeske – Director of Product Management at Drugstore.com, be my partner and official “sidekick” for two of my round table presentations – ‘Analyzing the Customer Experience’ and our very well attended ‘Critic’s Corner’ where she and I were allowed to play the Siskel and Ebert for Ecommerce.
We had a blast covering search, email and real time site examples; highlighting the good, the bad and the occasionally ugly sides of UI, site design, messaging and the like. I’ll refrain from going into presentations and evaluation specifics in fairness to the sites covered because those examinations were done for educational purposes.
So instead, here are a few things I will offer up:
- I always get a positive response to one of my tried and true marketing recommendations which is to weekly test your keywords! For most of you merchants, I am certain there are 10-15 keywords or phrases that can really drive traffic and business. You should therefore be typing those keywords and phrases into each of your major search engines each week and reviewing not only your natural search results rankings, but the actual experience as well – see where you land when you click those links. Is it what you expected? Is it what you wanted?
- And while we did not cover this in great depth during the show, I encourage you all to check out Alison’s latest insights captured last week during an interview at the Streaming Video West Conference. You can hear her shared thoughts on streaming video as presented on Woman’s Radio.
In closing, let me extend my personal and heartfelt thanks to Alison who proved to be the best round table and critic partner ever!
Today’s Economic Times: This is No Time to Joke
Let me first start off by saying that most of the time I enjoy reading the Bazaarvoice Blog – it’s well written and certainly at times a viable source for our ecommerce industry. But the most recent post by Sam Decker, their CMO, really caught my eye and made me do a double a take.
The gist of his posting “The CFO’s Favorite Marketing Program in Tough Times” is to justify paying $100K for a customer review solution that is available elsewhere in the marketplace for, well, let’s just say at a price which is normally 95% less than that.
And at the end of what has to be one of the longest posts I have ever read there, Sam summarizes the options facing online merchants today in these tough economic times:
“There are two responses to tough times – retreat and cut costs or be intelligently aggressive. When you’re intelligently aggressive, you choose effective marketing investments that hit the ‘market bulls-eye.’ driving long-term, sustainable P&L impact.”
Upon reading this, two things immediately jumped to mind:
- There is of course a THIRD OPTION – cut costs AND be intelligently aggressive. Why not seek out and then switch to a highly comparable (if not superior, due to our tag-based review functionality) review solution and save yourself $100K to your bottom line (or $500K in incremental sales to support the tool assuming a 20% average margin)
Now that is what I I would think is a truly sustainable P&L impact.
Some of the folks we’ve talked to as their contracts are up for renewal, share with us that on average they are shelling out close to $20 for each review generated. So what do we tell them? That importing content is not a difficult a task for us. If they switch over to PowerReviews, we will ensure all existing reviews remain and they do not have to start over from scratch – we do this all the time with legacy reviews.
- An old phrase my daddy used to say about selling ice cubes to Eskimos
More on the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas
I don’t think I have ever been busier than last week’s BIG show in Vegas!
So besides all the schmoozing that one must do there (and that’s a fun thing!) I had three different assignments while there. The first is the subject of today’s posting.
I had the distinct honor of introducing one of the first tracks of the show which was on Natural Search Efforts and Techniques – yes the ultimate desire of all online merchants. The timing could not have been more ideal as we here at PowerReviews had just completed an exciting and informative new case study with our client Brookstone and our mutual technology partner YourAmigo.
Working with John Lucey and Gary Smith we tested the power of user generated content in today’s online search behavior and the results were outstanding! By leveraging the content that was generated during the review submission process, Brookstone was able to capture an additional 33% increase in search traffic and corresponding revenue through the use of more socially based search terms!
Just think of it…we are asking today’s online shoppers to read and write UGC in terms of reviews and blogs and beyond, so of course this behavior is trickling into their online search behavior across the major search engines.
To read and learn more about these incredible and inspiring findings, download your own copy of our Case Study.
ShopSmart Shout Out for Buzzillions
Taking pride in a job well done is reward enough. Embracing that philosophy is core to our success at PowerReviews and is at the heart of our organization. We are rewarded with each and every client launch and watch in awe at times in the incredible way our clients are using customer reviews to enrich their shopping experiences and helping their customers make better purchase decisions.
We are just as prideful to have brought our vision to build a better online shopping experience through the powerful voice of the customer to life. And while all of us here think buzzillions.com, our reviews and recommendations site is just the greatest new way to shop for products, it is always nice when someone else thinks so too!
So with that said, I am pleased the share with you that ShopSmart magazine (www.shopsmart.org), from the publisher of Consumer Reports, just names Buzzillions of the the 7 sites that can save you thousands and find the right deals fast. We were chosen for our expertise in user reviews and here is what they had to say:
“This up-and-comer has user reviews on everything from cars and electronics to lower-ticket items like cosmetics, clothing and shoes to help you find the best products and avoid the worst. Unlike rival Epinions.com, this site offers a broad and ever-changing list of keywords to click on, based on user reviews, for searching.”
You can read the entire article and see the rest of their recommended sites in their November 2008 issue here Sites that can save you thousands
Again, and with much pride – thanks for the shout out ShopSmart!
What Happens in Vegas…
At least this time, what happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas as the ideas and topics presented at this year’s Shop.org Annual Summit will certainly be carried back by the attending ecommerce merchants to their respective companies.
And given the current economic conditions we certainly hope so as merchants will need a full box of tools to capitalize on the upcoming holiday season. And according to recent survey findings presented in the Internet Retailer magazine and summarized by eMarketer in a recent article, THE TOP WEB 2.0 PRIORITY is customer ratings and reviews!
I couldn’t agree more with the article’s findings, of course, that regardless of the channel or the type, “Online merchants focused on user ratings and reviews have the right priorities.” As well as that, “Ratings and reviews were the most-useful e-commerce features according to 44% of online shoppers surveyed…”
So between the Customer Review Solution PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) we provide to hundreds of retailers, powering more review functionality to more than 2,300 of their websites, and our very successful reviews and recommendations site Buzzillions (www.buzzillions.com), working with us is the safest bet in town!
In closing, I’ll take last Friday’s publication of this data as a “lucky omen” heading into our annual summit – so don’t be surprised if you see me at the tables!
