Bazaarvoice Closes $8.8 Million Series B
Duncan Riley
16 comments »
Bazaarvoice has closed $8.8 million in Series B funding in a round led by Battery Ventures with Austin Ventures and First Round Capital also participating. Battery Ventures General Partner Neeraj Agrawal has joined Bazaarvoice’s Board of Directors as part of the deal.
Texas-based Bazaarvoice provides white label Amazon-like editorial recommendations for products to other companies. The pitch is that it is cheaper for companies to use Bazaarvoice’s setup than build their own client in-house.
Other Bazaarvoice products include SyndicateVoice, a program where Bazaarvoice brokers relationships with leading shopping comparison engines — such as Smarter.com, Google, MSN and others syndicating clients’ reviews to these sites with links back to the retailers; and Ask & Answer, a white label community-driven Q&A for any product or service page.
Current BazaarVoice clients include Wal-Mart, Dell, QVC, Sears and Macy’s.
Bazaar Voice? uhhh, I don’t go that way. It may be alright for artsy Mac guys but there is nothing bazaar about this here MAN!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
add to the list with mahalo of companies that don’t grok that centralized editorial doesn’t scale. for vanilla copy, you can just cut and paste what the OEM themselves send along.
bezos is losing no sleep tonight.
Congratulations to Brett, Sam, and the entire BazaarVoice team. I have watched their amazing growth over the past year and I look forward to seeing continued success with the new funding.
More steroid cash for a crash and burn. Everyday I see more and more VCs pissing money away. They have to invest it since that is the reason investors invest with them. But some of this is getting ridiculous. When the 2.0 meltdown gets into full force, the 1.0 crash will seem like a middle school soccer match. People running around everywhere not knowing where to run to. I guess they will all head over to Facebook looking for jobs.
@Dominic
Couldnt agree more, Growing stupidity of web 2.0 startups is partly due to the investors funding almost anything which contains the keywords — UGC, Web 2.0, Ajax, Tagging, RSS… etc etc
I’d agree much of the web 2.0 money is being prepped for a big flush. In the case of Bazaarvoice I would have to disagree. Each and every quarter they have beat revenue expectations by providing high value returns for their customers by enabling customers to review products (and other voice of customer feature like Ask & Answer), and the companies to capitalize on the good will and increased conversions these reviews provide. Some of their clients they provide review functionality include Dell, Wal-Mart and Overstock.com. They charge companies like these for the functionality, monitoring and distribution of these reviews. This is providing social media functionality the old fashioned way. They earn from it.
They have one significant competitor who is a “web 2.0″ model. They give all the functionality away and make their money on a website with advertising because they host all those reviews on the site. I can’t imagine it is working out as well for them yet.
Full disclosure I am an advisor to Bazaarvoice.
uh sounds like a good presentation rather than a good product
to #2
Bazaar voice is not centralized editorial, check out there site and stuff. Their main gig is a hosted rating/reviewing/commenting engine that lets other sites (and they have some biggies (like QVC and Macy’s) add those capabilities easier. Think of it as a much fancier js-kit that you have to pay for.
Bazaarvoice is a profitable business model that has already been validated by over 120 paying clients, including some of those mentioned in the comments and the original post. We have repeatedly shown the presence of product reviews on an eCommerce site drives conversion (i.e., sales), customer loyalty (i.e., repeat buying), and a corresponding decrease in returns (as consumers are setting each other’s expectations in an honest way).
As an ASP (or SaaS), we make it easy for our clients to offer this functionality. We do the moderation for them with a stay-at-home workforce of primarily college-educated moms. We also provide them with a rich word-of-mouth analytics platform so that they can learn how to better serve their customers. Merchants quickly get addicted to this honest feedback about the products they are offering, and insight often leads to offering entirely new or better products. And then we syndicate that content out to 25 of the highest-traffic shopping portals, so that consumers find reviews from our retail clients and this serves as a means of advertising. This isn’t as easy as writing some JavaScript or chunking some code into a page. Clients like Overstock.com did this in-house for four years prior to outsourcing it to us.
As a profitable company, we will use these funds the further expand internationally, continue to expand beyond retail, create new solutions for our clients (Ask & Answer and SyndicateVoice, mentioned in the article, are only the beginning), and really put the pedal down on capitalizing on our opportunity.
For the history, we announced profitability in May:
http://www.bazaarvoice.com/press050207.html
The competitor that Bryan Eisenberg referred to in his comment is PowerReviews of course.
I recall that market studies that have previously assessed the “word-of-mouth” space tended to rank peer-level customer reviews highly — relative to the ROI benefit for eCommerce sites.
So, the VCs funding Bazaarvoice can probably point to research that validates their investment. Granted, that isn’t always the case for some of the more speculative start-up companies in the SaaS sector.
This is truly bazaar.
The CEO of Bazaarvoice is no stranger to running a successful start-up.
Blog post regarding Bazaarvoice and Founder