Shoppero Comes To America: Money For Writing Reviews
Duncan Riley
24 comments »
German social shopping platform Shoppero has launched an American version.
The site combines consumer written product reviews, lists and user profiles with a revenue sharing model that rewards users for contributing reviews to the site.
The German version launched 2 months ago and already rates in the top 3000 sites visited by Germans, according to Alexa.
Revenue is made in two ways. Users get a 20% share of revenue from product links and ads featured next to their reviews. Users who place “Adgets”, Shoppero’s shopping widgets on their sites get a 60% profit share from the Widgets.
The site is an interesting crossover product. The review side of the business will see Shoppero compete with established players such as CNET Reviews and Epinons to name but a few players in the space, yet on the other hand it will also compete with the growing number of widget providers as well (see our previous coverage here).
Consumer reviews do have a tangible value for all players in this space, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that some will be willing to pay for that data. The days of getting a free lunch from user-generated contributions may be coming to a close; I’d expect that Shoppero be one of many sites to come who will pay for or financially reward users for writing product reviews.
Great concept. Its too bad a site like epinions didn’t launch something like this.
I wonder how genuine these reviews are since the writer’s profits probably correlates with the positivity of his/her recommendation.
Helen
Google ad overload… feel like I’m on blogspot.
Seems like a great concept…
@Helen: that is a very good point. we rely on a combination of advertising plus affiliate links to assure that people get money even if they write “don’t buy this product”. We don’t want tainted content and we want the users to freely express their opinions about products.
[disclaimer: I am the founder and CEO of shoppero.com]
looks like you only make money by recommending it.
Epinions was the first social review site
For the first couple of years Epinions gave reviewers a significant share of revenue from people who clicked through and bought a product after they read their review. However in order to become profitable they gradually scaled back the reward until they got rid of it all together.
The business model didn’t work then I wonder if it will work now.
gr8 post, i’ll try it now
Social Review, payed. Interesting concept.
Regarding profitability, honestly how much costs do you incur nowadays with cheap hosting and agile development possibilities by using symfony or ror
Wondering how can I write a review there.
If they write dont buy this product; I promise - it will still make them less than if they wrote buy this one for sure…
with 1 review per 1 product there is not wisdom of the crowd …
- and if their is more than 1 review per product; you probably sort them by how much ROI they make - therefore …
- until you solve these problems; your site is broke.
Didn’t epinions try this years ago? Seemed to be a pretty miserable failure…
@Thierry:
I don’t know about Shoppero, but you’re dreaming if you think cheap hosting and agile development is all that’s needed to reach profitability.
There’s much more to an online business like Shoppero. Making sure a system is scalable is not cheap, good management of the transactional aspects (and fees you incur), customer service, marketing and much, much more.
So, Epinions did try this and still do today. And as a former product manager of Epinions, I can tell you that paying for reviews is sustainable, however not at the rates Epinions was originally paying.
These days payment for most reviews is a bit like poker money. It’s a way to keep track of who is doing best, rather than making a living off of it.
Additionally, the system for payment is a bit of a black box to cut down on gaming the system. It’s still surprising to me the efforts people will go through to make a few bucks.
I suspect that Shoppero will eventually lower their rates or introduce some level of randomness to their payment mechanisms.
Cheers,
Randy Stewart
randy@boxbe.com
@nico lumma
so is it shared advertising revenue or compensation for the review? if its just shared advertising you’ve got an issues w/ habitual commentors submitting bogus comments - or folks w/ a lot of free time.
if its for the quality of the review - i think that is somewhat more interesting but you would have difficulty preventing product influencers/haters skewing positive/negative ratings on products and getting rewarded for the review.
i think this becomes even more complicated when you have company focused blogs (i.e. tuaw) and the like that are focused on products coming from those companies/vendors.
i agree compensating for opinions or UGC has to happen — great start — lets see what other models appear.
Looks very promising — thanks for the clarification, Nico.
Shoppero could be a way to build a loyalty site with the review being the mechanism to create the loyalty. Even though it is a paid loyalty the product is the review which is highly valuable to the advertiser.
Completely agree with Randy here (comment 14), as people will always find a way to game the system when the reward is public. If you also offer higher fees then you end up with a business in which the top contributors are those who are making the most money (and it’s not a lot) by doing whatever they can to influence the system.
Philip/Randy, thanks for your comments. I think people will always try to game the system, but we rely on our users to look for spam and spammers, in addition to our algorithms that persistently look for intersting developments where suddenly peaks evolve, etc.
That issue really concerns us and I think this will be an ongoing process for us.
Is it American version or English version of the German site. I presume non-American English writers can participate too!
I went to en.shoppero.com, entered a search, and the page that came back was the German site. You might want to look at fixing that, Nico.
(Yes, I have my browser configured to have English as my preferred language.)
@mathew: wew, that shouldn’t happen. Well fix it or start calling it a multilangual feature.