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 and based on 8,000 unique product templates. When users write reviews they are asked to supply answers based largely on tags, and PowerReviews suggests tags that previous users have chosen. When a new users is looking for product research, they are asked a to click on tags that describe what they are looking for. PowerReviews is then able to recommend a few products out of a category that might suit them best. It works surprisingly well - to try it, go to the digital camera page on Buzzillions and answer some of the questions in the green box center top.
Of all the new product review startups mentioned in the second paragraph above, Buzzillions seems to have found the most unique business model. Whether it will be successful or not is yet to be seen, but we’ll be checking in with them periodically for updates.
The company raised $6.2 million from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in December 2005.
Love it, that is just a fabulous idea. Unique, already operating, with a clear way to make money off of it. And it actually adds to the user experience for the vendors. Good all around, and best of luck.
I’d love there to be mroe reviews floating wround, too often you search for them and the title tag claim there are reviews on the page with nothign actually there. like CNet, ZDNet, all of those. That’s a side note, but I think a symtpom of the general weakness so far in the area.
It’d be nice if they sold the reviews as well as a web service. We use Amazon review information, and even just a differentiator for search engine results I bet the results would be worth a little money. Maybe too little, since AWS is free, but I bet they’d have some takers.
Looking again I would not expect them to share their data too freely, as it is their source for revenue on PowerReviews.com. But I suppose if ad revenues don’t completely cut it, licensing the reviews might help. It’ll be interesting to watch, definitely.
Hey Mike: You forgot to add iNods (http://www.inods.com) to the list. You reviewed our early beta last year.
@Direct Textbooks,
I totally agree with you. Check the iNods for Merchants program which we will be launching soon and will allow merchants to add rich review content to their product pages.
Vaibhav– nice, and thanks.
*Impressed*
Buzzilions is well made. Easy to navigate, all ajax’d but the best part of it. no lag what so ever. Super fast!
I just had to say, this idea is absolutely brilliant, and the tag suggest feature looks lovely. Although I don’t buy online all that often, I read a lot of reviews and I’d love to be able to read reviews on-site instead of being sent off to Amazon.
I wouldn’t trust this as a source for reviews. It doesn’t control the reviews it publishes so it can’t guarantee the independence of what it publishes, either on retailers’ sites or its own.
This is like those Indian Wool companies. They buy wool in bulk from Australia weave into fabrics in India at a low cost, make end products like scarves and shawls and sell it right back to the Australians.
Sneaky but smart.
Best idea in a while (y). Good luck!
Awesome idea, highly innovative
http://www.whatshottoday.com
The management behind PowerReviews is on the ball and have a significant track record of success in the online retail space (founders of FogDog and former VP at yahoo Shopping).
We are an ecommerce software vendor and a partner of PowerReviews. The process for collecting reviews they offer is significantly better than the Amazon free-form input and drop-down rating box. The integration was painless and the value it brings to an online retailer is huge - both for community building and search engine optimization.
We did a podcast with Andy Chen the CEO of PowerReviews a few months back at eTail Mid-Market in San Francisco: http://www.getelastic.com/reta.....ew-podcast
At Bazaarvoice, we have been innovating new forms of advertising based on product reviews for some time now. We have 11 shopping portal partners, and you can read more about SyndicateVoice here:
http://www.bazaarvoice.com/SyndicateVoice.html
Advertising Age called this “the killer ad app” in a cover-story when we first announced it.
The difference here is that our model is based on partnering with the shopping comparison portals, versus PowerReviews competing with them. You can cast a far wider net, from an advertising perspective, when you partner with already established portals like MSN, PriceRunner, and Shop.com. Remember that they have spent years building a traffic base.
In short, we believe that partnering with many established portals is the more client friendly strategy. And we are seeing the performance from a customer acquisition perspective really pay off for our clients.
Wow, this is a great model. I have been following bazaaarvoice, and since nothing beats free, I think they may have some growth problems ahead.
BUT…look at this page for a kitchen mixer…
http://www.buzzillions.com/Mod.....link=image
I am not sure I believe the reviews. I mean, who writes like this “This is exspensive for a hand mixer but this is worth every cent… Easy to clean and handle… It definatly gets the what ever job you need it for done”, and for a crappy little kitchen mixer ?
And all the reviews are from SmartBargain. I think they have some spam issues, I just drilled down to 1 product, so not sure if this is rampant. But after reading these reviews, was not inclinded to read more.
Looking great- Reviews are awesome; I would like to get a couple review pages going …
- such as product #1, #2, #3 …. when they get to the top of search engine….
- then I would; take what got them to top; and create a php script taht generates in the same format - reviews for all - products heh
Love that business model… expect we’ll soon see many more like it. Nice work. -chrisco
I love the concept but are they still in beta? On their site I cannot find any way of becoming a customer and adding reviews to my web site.
Sincerely,
Ben
Ben Watson (ben.watson@thomson.com)
VP, Collaboration - Thomson NETg http://www.netg.com
This is a hot space and while I like the PowerReviews interface and the allure of “free” reviews software, there’s a major reason why companies would want to OWN their own reviews and potentially not syndicate all of this content.
Reviews are link bait. They are very good for SEO. It’s keyword rich content that improves merchandising. Even Amazon purportedly only syndicates a portion of their reviews because they understand the importance of having unique content on their site. When thousands of sites have the same syndicated content, it no longer has the same SEO benefits it could have had if concentrated.
I was first introduced to this company when they were mentioned in Internet Retailer magazine back in January. I agree that it’s a very unique and interesting concept. I went through the PowerReviews website and it looks like they give their merchants ownership of the reviews they generate. So I’m curious what kind of control merchants have over their reviews. Can they syndicate elsewhere as well?
One major problem from a shopping standpoint is their product selection is limited. Since they’re only showing products for their merchant partners they really don’t have a large selection. Another problem is the domain. It just doesn’t make sense. Also, the site is lacking social features and I couldn’t really find much reason to register.
On a positive note their interface looks great and is easy to use.
PowerReviews is definitely onto something here! I believe that this business model will be much more successful long term than the “only let the big boys play” model of BazaarVoice.
The power of the mid and long tail customers shouldn’t be underestimated.
Cheers to PowerReviews for bringing a new idea to the table, and best of luck to them!
love it so much
http://oursproducts.blogspot.com/
I don’t see why this idea is so brilliant. In fact I’m mystified at all the accolades.
This only works if Buzzillions gets major traction and it is a late comer to a highly competitive and crowded space. Buzzillions is also not uniquely helpful for users than the competition and lacks a true UGC feel to it.
The things Microsoft is doing with user rating and reviews on Collections.Live is way more interesting and useful to consumers and shows a much higher probability for long term success in the UGC/Retail space than PowerReviews.
I signed up at this site and have been browsing around on it over this past weekend. It doesn’t seem that great compared to Amazon. It doesn’t have a huge electronics section yet. I haven’t really checked out all the features.
I know someone’s gripe was not wanting to scroll all the way down to read the Amazon reviews. All you need to do is click on the link next to the starts indicating how many reviews there are. You’ll then be brought to an entire page dedicated solely to those user reviews. I use this all the time.
Another great thing I just noticed is that when you search for an item - Amazon will now tell you whether or not it is being sold by Amazon and if it is eligible for free saver shipping. Although some products I found that were being sold by Amazon but did not display free saver shipping so you may want to click the item and make sure in the side bar where they have other sellers that Amazon is or is not listed there.
I think this will be a great service but there is a significant difference between user ratings and exprert ratings. I love to read user reviews to get some practical insight into products. However, I think that in general user ratings are not that great in categories where the consumer doesn’t have multiple points of comparison.
Whose rating would you trust that of somebody who has reviewed and compared 50+ digital cameras vs that of someone who has only bought one digital camera?
Bazaarvoice is better!
Aggregating reviews is a great idea for products. MerchantCircle.com does it for restaurants and businesses.
A review site could really take off if they would share revenue with the consumers that report on products.
All due respect to Bazaarvoice who have built the reviews product market to date, but PowerReviews use does not exclude a merchant from taking advantage of other shopping portals. Plus, if the portal strategy does not work out (which it should), they could simply switch to a similar licensed model as Bazaarvoice and battle on a product vs product basis.
I think there is room for both companies as long as the focus remains on the customers not each other. When a company takes their eye off their own business and is threatened by the competition, they die.
Does Endeca get any points for their role?
Quick question: Does PowerReviews own the review content or do the retailers?
Retailers own the review content and can do with it as they see fit.
It’s a brilliant idea, and I love the look and feel of their sites. Buzzillions needs to be fine-tuned though. I did a search for Apple TV and the Apple iPod showed up in the search results. They also need to add more merchants, and give their merchant partners more visibility, it’s not clear really where you can buy the product you are reading about.
Secondly, how will the search engines respond to having identical content (if their user reviews are shared) across multiple sites? My guess is that it will not be a factor, but it could keep their PR rank somewhat low.