Customer-Review Outsourcer Bazaarvoice Debuts
Bazaarvoice, a company that manages customer ratings and reviews for online merchants, is expected to come out of so-called stealth mode announce its first customers today.
Petco Animal Supplies, CompUSA and Golfsmith have implemented the service, hoping reviews by customers will help boost conversion-to-sale rates on their Web sites.
Seed merchant The Burpee Company has also implemented Bazaarvoice.
Brett Hurt, the company’s co-founder and CEO founded site analytics firm Coremetrics in 1999. Sam Decker, Bazaarvoice’s vice president of marketing, formerly managed Dell.com.
While companies like Amazon.com have featured customer reviews for years, Austin, TX-based Bazaarvoice is believed to be the first company to provide outsourced review services. The launch also comes at a time when merchants are increasingly aiming to use word-of-mouth marketing to boost sales.
“There are people who know everything you want to know about [for example] digital cameras, and those people’s voices are getting embedded on the clients’ site and serving as a means to help sell more product and give richer information,” said Hurt. “It also serves as a means to help people coming onto the site trust that brand.”
Bazaarvoice employees check each product review to screen them for inappropriate content. The company hires only people who work from home such as stay-at-home mothers and people with disabilities, said Hurt.
Bazaarvoice also manages search engine optimization for clients. The company claims that visitors who came to the CompUSA Web site after finding a customer review on AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo had a 50% higher conversion rate and spent 20% more per order than the typical CompUSA.com visitor.
Companies using Bazaarvoice can customize the number of product attributes customers can rate. Petco, for example, asks reviewers to rate products from one to five paws under the categories “overall,” “pet satisfaction,” “appearance,” and “quality.”
Giving people categories also helps them organize their thoughts as they write their reviews, said Hurt.
Product reviews also help merchants monitor bad feedback and take action accordingly, said Hurt. Petco, for example, has contacted some negative reviewers personally to try and resolve their problems.
“We use this as an opportunity to get feedback they might not otherwise give us,” said John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce for San Diego-based Petco. Lazarchic said Petco allows negative reviews as long as they aren’t obscene or obviously off the mark.
Also, displaying negative reviews gives the merchant more credibility, said Hurt.
Bazaarvoice charges a set-up fee plus a monthly service fee, which starts at $2,000 a month for companies selling less than $10 million a year, Hurt said. Price is negotiated on a page-view and order-volume basis, he said.
