July 20, 2007

BazaarVoice Gets Walmart Deal

Michael Arrington

9 comments »

Walmart finally added user comments and reviews to its website. Reuters covered the news today, which was picked up by major media. In those articles, Walmart CMO Cathy Halligan said reviews and comments were “the No. 1 customer-requested feature.”

What this article didn’t mention is that Austin-based Bazaarvoice, a company I covered just over a year ago, is the technology and service behind Walmart’s new features.

Like Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia, Bazaarvoice provides services to ecommerce sites that they may not be able to, or want to, build themselves. But where Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia provide recommendations, BazaarVoice offers user generated content features like comments, ratings and reviews.

Getting such a large etailer is a major milestone for them. BazaarVoice isn’t the sexiest startup, but it has a real revenue model and is clearly seeing some success. It was funded by First Round Capital and Tom Ball at Austin Ventures.

See our coverage of Buzzillions as well, a BazaarVoice competitor (albeit targeting smaller ecommerce sites).

Sphere It

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Austin Startup

July 20th, 2007 at 8:47 am

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blogger

July 20th, 2007 at 5:46 am

How hard is it to build a “Customer Review” feature in your website? Can companies sustain and make revenue building this feature? Does it look like a long term viable business model
Becks

July 20th, 2007 at 5:54 am

don’t know the answers to “blogger’s” questions, but I can tell you there is little I buy online anymore than doesn’t have some sort of review I can do… otherwise it better have hassle-free return policy in place. It’s inconceivable to me that there are still retailers that do NOT have some sort of system whether built in-house or farmed out.
Ian

July 20th, 2007 at 5:59 am

I dunno, it seems like walmart is just the addition to HP, Dell and a few other large retailers…
gettit

July 20th, 2007 at 6:09 am

I just happen to be looking at some things on Walmart this week, and suddenly I think yesterday they all had reviews. Of course I thought people had finally reviewed them, not that a new service was put in place, but it was a pretty good implementation. I definitely lead to my sale.
Brett

July 20th, 2007 at 7:36 am

Thanks Michael. Yesterday was one of the proudest days in our company’s history, and we appreciate you noticing. This is a huge moment for the retail industry and ratings and reviews. Here is the perspective of Andy Sernovitz, the founder of WOMMA and author of “Word of Mouth Marketing” on his blog:
http://www.damniwish.com/2007/.....-mome.html
randy

July 20th, 2007 at 8:38 am

Bazillions is a bust.. the company has yet to provide a simple way of signing up and downloading their little ratings/review widget.
BuzzillionsJim

July 20th, 2007 at 10:17 am

Congrats to the BV folks. It seems that bigger and bigger companies are launching consumer reviews on their sites everyday (such as Staples: venturebeat.com/2007/07/19/consumer-product-reviews-here-there-everywhere/)

Randy, sorry about the current lack of a DIY review widget, keep your eyes peeled for future developments. In the mean time, you can check out: mashable.com/2007/07/19/rateitall-consumer-widget/ and js-kit.com/ratings/

-Jim, VP and GM, Buzzillions.com
David Mackey

July 20th, 2007 at 3:37 pm

Very sweet for BazaarVoice - and a nice feature addition for consumers.