PowerReviews was founded in 2005 by Andrew Chen and Robert Chea and is now considered to be a leading provider of social commerce solutions. The company has helped hundreds of retailers engage customers and build communities online. Internet Retailer included the company in 2009’s Top 500 Solutions Winner. Sites such as RadioShack, Diapers.com, TicketsNow, and Orbitz and many more are using customer reviews systems provided by PowerReviews.

PowerReviews AnswerBox Overview

42% of online shoppers have left a site without purchasing multiple products because they couldn’t get a question answered about just one of the products in their shopping cart.

AnswerBox connects potential buyers with customers and staff while they’re browsing products. This solution streamlines the shopping experience by giving consumers the answers they need without leaving the retailer’s website.

AnswerBox Benefits

• Credible answers from experienced customers and expert staff
• Creates a sense of community between new and loyal customers
• Increase conversion

AnswerBox Features

• Full Moderation: 100% control of content
• Multi-Pronged Response: a variety of informed answers
• Virtual FAQ: common questions of a specific product displayed directly on product page

PowerReviews Blog

InSite is a blog by PowerReviews where they share experiences and insights from the industry with anyone interested in emerging technologies and social commerce.

• Official PowerReviews InSite Blog

Andy Chen, PowerReviews Co-Founder, Answers 5 Questions About Social Commerce

I think a lot of small businesses are interested in social commerce but unsure how to put it into practice. What advise would you give to these eCommerce retailers?

First of all, get started. Social commerce is rapidly evolving, so it’s important that small businesses learn how to learn from, listen to and empower their customers in a meaningful way. The two social commerce tools that intersect both (a) proven and consistent ROI to the merchant; and (b) demanded and desired by the consumer; are Ratings&Reviews and Q&A (we call this AnswerBox), so this is where we would start. Building a “Community” (ala Yelp/Facebook) is further away and not yet a practical application for most businesses.

Are there any common mistakes or misconceptions businesses make when they first engage their consumers?

The “Build it and they will come” approach is a big mistake. Consumer engagement is difficult to create, and it’s important to put the right mechanisms in place to drive engagement. Therefore, PowerReviews always recommends a series of best practices to create awareness and engagement in starting a social commerce program… most importantly to focus on the merchant’s “recent purchasers“, who have the highest propensity to participate.

Reviews and ratings are one of the most popular methods of social commerce. What makes this method so effective? Why do you think people are drawn to reviews and ratings?

There are several trends driving the need and desire by consumers for ratings and reviews. Firstly, consumers have been trained for almost 15 years to seek out ratings and reviews when shopping online by the major eCommerce sites such as Amazon, Ebay, and Zappos.  Therefore, they EXPECT reviews as part of a complete shopping experience.

Secondly, consumers are smart, and understand that no products are right for all people, and that they cannot solely depend on manufacturer or retailer supplied product information. The voices that they trust to guide them to the RIGHT product are their friends and “people like them” (e.g. people with similar needs and lifestyles). Ratings and reviews fill that need exactly.

How can a reviews and ratings system help a small eCommerce business?

Surprisingly, we see that the impact of ratings and reviews are HIGHER for PowerRevews’ small business clients than they are for the larger, well-known companies. There are several factors, in my opinion, that drive this:

Firstly, small businesses typically have more of a specialty/niche vs. a big box feel. One of our clients, for example is Alpaca Direct, which only sells products made from Alpaca. This means that consumers on those sites are naturally more enthusiastic about the products, and often have very specific needs. Reviews from other enthusiasts help other shoppers become more confident that they are buying the “right product“.

Secondly, since small businesses are not as well known as the larger chains, reviews serve as endorsements for the merchant overall, in addition to the specific product. The message that the merchant can send by posting reviews is that “yes, lots of customers have put down their money, received a product, and were asked about their experience“, which is a tremendous confidence building tool that clearly separates the fly-by-night operations from the legitimate small businesses.

Allowing consumers to share ideas is not only valuable to potential buyers but it can also be valuable feedback for the merchant. How can a business best use and gather this information?

This is a fairly broad area, and perhaps one of the largest opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to get value from their social commerce programs. There is an adage in the usability or consumer research world use — “measure what they do, not what they say“. Therefore, PowerReviews takes the approach that the content within the reviews, or AnswerBox, content is where the most useful insights and ideas live vs. creating a separate solution to solicit ideas from customers.

Many of our clients are already using their data to drive powerful business value such as:

• Optimizing their inventory by returning low rated products to the vendors
• Driving their merchandising by highlighting top-rated products
• Understanding specific product flaws or gaps in their inventory
• Improving their product content based on feedback from customers

We support these insights in several ways:

• Our tag-based reviews allow our clients to quantitatively understand the customer feedback (e.g. we can easily understand the consensus around the pros, cons, uses, and buyer-types for each product… and compare them across the category). This is something that we had previously done by hand, or by unreliable natural language processing techniques…or not at all.
• We provide a “Product Suggestions” module (for free) as part of our ratings and reviews solution. This allows customers to provide their own ideas to improve the product after they’ve tried it for themselves. This is much more effective than a regular focus group, because these reviewers have recently purchased the product and are in the best position to provide thoughtful feedback.
• We moderate 100% of the content and flag any reviews that might be interesting to a merchant’s customer service, product, and/or merchandising teams.
• We provide detailed reports back to our clients that allow them to route the data to the appropriate category or brand-level business owner.

In a nutshell, we absolutely see how the underlying data from consumers can dramatically improve core retail and manufacturing processes in the near future.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts

A big thanks to Andy Chen of PowerReviews for taking to time to give some good advice to our readers.

I also want to thank Lisa Tarter of Tidal Wave PR for helping me put this interview together. Like many of our readers, I’m still learning about social commerce and I hope they found Andrew’s answers as beneficial as I did. A common theme that Chen and many others emphasize is the importance of retailers to listen to their customers. The value of the feedback from customers can often be overlooked. However, using it to evolve your business is one of the most important parts of social commerce. We’ll be posting a few other articles exploring social commerce soon so stay tuned.